ide he
would scarce have dared to show his favourite hero sustained by, found
a hundred agreeable and interesting things happen to him which were all,
one way or another, affluents of the golden stream.

The great renewed resonance--renewed by the incredible luck of the
play--was always in his ears without so much as a conscious turn of his
head to listen; so that the queer world of his fame was not the mere
usual field of the Anglo-Saxon boom, but positively the bottom of the
whole theatric sea, unplumbed source of the wave that had borne him
in the course of a year or two over German, French, Italian, Russian,
Scandinavian foot-lights. Paris itself really appeared for the hour the
centre of his cyclone, with reports and "returns," to say nothing of
agents and emissaries, converging from the minor capitals; though his
impatience was scarce the less keen to get back to London, where his
work had had no such critical excoriation to survive, no such lesson of
anguish to learn, as it had received at the hand of supreme authority,
of that French authority which was in such a matter the only one to be
artistically reckoned with. If his spirit indeed had had to reckon with
it his fourth act practically hadn't: it continued to make him blush
every night for the public more even than the inimitable _feuilleton_
had made him blush for himself.

This had figured, however, after all, the one bad drop in his cup;
so that, for the rest, his high-water mark might well have been, that
evening at Gloriani's studio, the approach of his odd and charming
applicant, vaguely introduced at the latter's very own request by their
hostess, who, with an honest, helpless, genial gesture, washed her fat
begemmed hands of the name and identity of either, but left the fresh,
fair, ever so habitually assured, yet ever so easily awkward Englishman
with his plea to put forth. There was that in this pleasant personage
which could still make Berridge wonder what conception of profit from
him might have, all incalculably, taken form in such a head--these being
truly the last intrenchments of our hero's modesty. He wondered,
the splendid young man, he wondered awfully, he wondered (it was
unmistakable) quite nervously, he wondered, to John's ardent and acute
imagination, quite beautifully, if the author of "The Heart of Gold"
would mind just looking at a book by a friend of his, a great friend,
which he himself believed rather clever, and had in fact foun