It was a minute to six when the messenger announced Lord Henry Highbarn, and the moment the announcement was made, Denis, reaching for his hat and stick, took leave of his chief. He strode out into the street with a sprightly gait, humming as he went:
"I don't adore the girl in blue
For all her family's after you."
There is probably in most men a sense of quality, a power of divination in regard to value which, on occasions when they are confronted by a stranger whose worth they do not know, informs them immediately of the comparative rarity or commonness of his type. This sense may at first be baffled by the delusive disguises in which men sometimes present themselves, but as a rule a chance word, an artless gesture, or even a glance, quickly corrects the initial error of the eye, and in a moment the original estimate is adjusted to the unmistakable evidence of a definite quality.
When this peculiar apprehensiveness in regard to worth becomes aware of any marked superiority in a fellow creature,—an experience which in unhappy lives very seldom occurs,—a feeling of certainty usually accompanies it, which is as mysterious as the evidence upon which it is based is intangible and elusive. A man knows that he has met his superior, he knows too how far the superiority he recognises extends, and he is conscious of experiencing something exceptional, something exquisitely precious.
That such encounters are becoming every day more rare, probably explains the increasing growth, in modern times, of that kind of disbelief and heresy which, far from being wanton, arises from a total inability to envisage greatness, whether in kings, ideals, or gods. For we arrive at our most exalted images, not by solitary flights of imagination unassisted, but by actual progressive steps in the world of concrete things; so that the spring-board from which we take our final leap into the highest concepts of what a god might be, is always the highest man we happen to have met. We can have no other starting-point. Hence in an age when greatness among men is too rare to be felt as a universal fact, a disbelief in all gods is bound sooner or later to supervene.
When Lord Henry Highbarn presented himself before Sir Joseph, it was plain from the meek droop of the baronet's eyelids and the subdued hesitating tone of his voice, that something in the young nobleman's appearance had like a flash intimated to the experienced financial magnate that here was someone of a quality as unfamiliar as it was rare. Moreover, the difference which the older man felt distinguished him from his visitor was of a kind too fundamental and insuperable to challenge even that friendly rivalry so instinctive between two natures each conscious of their own particular efficiency and excellence.
Indeed, it needed all the elaborate complications of our modern civilisation to account even for the meeting of these two people under the same roof, not to speak of the fact that they met on an equal footing.
The one, a plain but not unpretentious man of business, still a little perplexed by his stupendous success, and not yet certain of his precise social level, revealed in his unshapely but kindly features the modest rung on which Nature herself would probably have placed him, if the peculiar economic conditions of his Age had not intervened to bring about a different result; while two characteristics alone led one to suspect his latent power,—his large energetic hands with their powerful spatulate fingers, and his masterful and meditative dark eyes.
The other,—a tall, muscular, youthful-looking aristocrat, with deep-set thoughtful blue eyes, a straight finely-chiselled nose, and a full eloquent mouth (the whole overshadowed by an unusually lofty brow, from which, particularly over the temples, the hair had noticeably receded)—possessed that unconscious ease of manner and unassertive masterfulness of bearing, which derive on the one hand from breeding, and on the other from a constant habit of preoccupation with external problems, that is unfavourable to any self-concern. As his alert vision took in the details of his surroundings, including the person of Sir Joseph himself, on whom he appeared to cast only the most casual sidelong glances, it was clear that his mind, far from being occupied with internal questionings, was measuring even then the probable extent to which this visit might serve some ultimate important purpose upon which the whole gravity and earnestness of his being seemed to be concentrated; and if his solemn features occasionally relaxed into a smile, it was precisely the habitual gravity of his mien that lent his passing levity such extraordinarily persuasive merriness.