the eminent thing, held it out to
Berridge as artlessly as if it had been a striking natural specimen
of some sort, a rosy round apple grown in his own orchard, or an
exceptional precious stone, to be admired for its weight and lustre.
Berridge accepted the offer mechanically--relieved at the prompt fading
of his worst fear, yet feeling in himself a tell-tale facial blankness
for the still absolutely anomalous character of his friend's appeal. He
was even tempted for a moment to lay the volume down without looking at
it--only with some extemporised promise to borrow it of their host and
take it home, to give himself to it at an easier moment. Then the very
expression of his fellow-guests own countenance determined in him a
different and a still more dreadful view; in fact an immediate collapse
of the dream in which he had for the splendid previous space of time
been living. The young Lord himself, in his radiant costly barbarism,
figured far better than John Berridge could do the prepossessing
shepherd, the beautiful mythological mortal "distinguished" by a
goddess; for our hero now saw that his whole manner of dealing with
his ridiculous tribute was marked exactly by the grand simplicity, the
prehistoric good faith, as one might call it, of far-off romantic and
"plastic" creatures, figures of exquisite Arcadian stamp, glorified
rustics like those of the train of peasants in "A Winter's Tale," who
thought nothing of such treasure-trove, on a Claude Lorrain sea-strand,
as a royal infant wrapped in purple: something in that fabulous style of
exhibition appearing exactly what his present demonstration might have
been prompted by. "The Top of the Tree, by Amy Evans"--scarce credible
words floating before Berridge after he had with an anguish of effort
dropped his eyes on the importunate title-page--represented an object
as alien to the careless grace of goddess-haunted Arcady as a washed-up
"kodak" from a wrecked ship might have been to the appreciation of some
islander of wholly unvisited seas. Nothing could have been more in the
tone of an islander deplorably diverted from his native interests and
dignities than the glibness with which John's own child of nature went
on. "It's her pen-name, Amy Evans"--he couldn't have said it otherwise
had he been a blue-chinned penny-a-liner; yet marking it with a
disconnectedness of intelligence that kept up all the poetry of his own
situation and only crashed into that of other persons.