It all came back again to the really great ease of really great ladies, and to the perfect facility of everything when once they were great enough. _That_ might become the delicious thing to him, he more and more felt, as soon as it should be supremely attested; it was ground he had ventured on, scenically, representation-ally, in the artistic sphere, but without ever dreaming he should “realise” it thus in the social. Handsomely, gallantly just now, moreover, he didn’t so much as let it occur to him that the social experience would perhaps on some future occasion richly profit further scenic efforts; he only lost himself in the consciousness of all she invited him to believe. It took licence, this consciousness, the next moment, for a tremendous further throb, from what she had gone on to say to him in so many words--though indeed the words were nothing and it was all a matter but of the implication that glimmered through them: “Do you _want_ very much your supper here?” And then while he felt himself glare, for charmed response, almost to the point of his tears rising with it: “Because if you don’t----!” “Because if I don’t--?” She had paused, not from the faintest shade of timidity, but clearly for the pleasure of making him press. “Why shouldn’t we go together, letting me drive you home?” “You’ll come home with me?” gasped John Berridge while the perspiration on his brow might have been the morning dew on a high lawn of Mount Ida. “No--you had better come with _me_. That’s what I mean; but I certainly will come to you with pleasure some time if you’ll let me.” She made no more than that of the most fatuous of freedoms, as he felt directly he had spoken that it might have seemed to her; and before he had even time to welcome the relief of not having then himself, for beastly contrition, to make more of it, she had simply mentioned, with her affectionate ease, that she wanted to get away, that of the bores there she might easily, after a little, have too much, and that if he’d but say the word they’d nip straight out together by an independent door and be sure to find her motor in the court. What word he had found to say, he was afterward to reflect, must have little enough mattered; for he was to have kept, of what then occurred, but a single other impression, that of her great fragrant rustle beside him over the rest of the ample room and toward their nearest and friendliest resource, the door by which he had come in and which gave directly upon a staircase. This independent image was just that of the only other of his fellow-guests with whom he had been closely concerned; he had thought of him rather indeed, up to that moment, as the Princess’s fellow-Olympian--but a new momentary vision of him seemed now to qualify it.