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THE IVORY TOWER

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THE IVORY TOWER

1

HENRY JAMES

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL

W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.

GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

COPYRIGHT
1917

PREFACE

THE IVORY TOWER, one of the two novels which Henry
James left unfinished at his death, was designed to
consist of ten books. Three only of these were written,
with one chapter of the fourth, and except for the
correction of a few obvious slips the fragment is here
printed in full and without alteration. It was com-
posed during the summer of 1914. The novel seems
to have grown out of another which had been planned
by Henry James in the winter of 1909-10. Of this
the opening scenes had been sketched and a few pages
written when it was interrupted by illness. On taking
it up again, four years later, Henry James almost
entirely recast his original scheme, retaining certain
of the characters (notably the Bradham couple,} but
otherwise giving an altogether fresh setting to the
central motive. The new novel had reached the point
where it breaks off by the beginning of August 1914.
With the outbreak of war Henry James found he could
no longer work upon a fiction supposed to represent
contemporary or recent life. The completed chapters
— which he had dictated to his secretary, in accordance
with his regular habit for many years past — were
revised and laid aside, not again to be resumed.

v

078

PREFACE

The pages of preliminary notes, also here printed in
full, were not of course intended for publication. It
was Henry James's constant practice, before beginning
a novel, to test and explore, in a written or dictated
sketch of this kind, the possibilities of the idea which
he had in mind. Such a sketch was in no way a first
draft of the novel. He used it simply as a means of
close approach to his subject, in order that he might
completely possess himself of it in all its bearings.
The arrangement of chapters and scenes would so be
gradually evolved, but the details were generally left
to be determined in the actual writing of the book. It
will be noticed, for example, that in the provisional
scheme of The Ivory Tower no mention is made of
the symbolic object itself or of the letter which is de-
posited in it. The notes, having served their purpose,
would not be referred to again, and were invariably
destroyed when the book was finished.

In the story of The Death of the Lion Henry James
has exactly described the manner of these notes, in
speaking of the " written scheme of another book "
which is shewn to the narrator by Neil Paraday :
" Loose liberal confident, it might have passed for a
great gossiping eloquent letter — the overflow into talk
of an artist's amorous plan." If justification were
needed for the decision to publish this " overflow " it
might be found in Faraday's last injunction to his
friend : " Print it as it stands — beautifully."

PERCY LUBBOCK.
VI

CONTENTS

THE IVORY TOWER i

Notes for THE IVORY TOWER - 263

BOOK FIRST

IT was but a question of leaving their own con-
tracted " grounds/' of crossing the Avenue and
proceeding then to Mr. Betterman's gate, which
even with the deliberate step of a truly massive
young person she could reach in three or four
minutes. So, making no other preparation than
to open a vast pale-green parasol, a portable pavi-
lion from which there fluttered fringes, frills and
ribbons that made it resemble the roof of some
Burmese palanquin or perhaps even pagoda, she
took her way while these accessories fluttered in
the August air, the morning freshness, and the
soft sea-light. Her other draperies, white and
voluminous, yielded to the mild breeze in the
manner of those of a ship held back from speed
yet with its canvas expanded ; they conformed to
their usual law of suggestion that the large loose
ponderous girl, mistress as she might have been of
the most expensive modern aids to the constitu-
tion of a " figure," lived, as they said about her,

THE IVORY TOWER

in wrappers and tea-gowns ; so that, save for her
enjoying obviously the rudest health, she might
have been a convalescent creeping forth from the
consciousness of stale bedclothes. She turned in
at the short drive, making the firm neat gravel
creak under her tread, and at the end of fifty yards
paused before the florid villa, a structure smothered
in senseless architectural ornament, as to put her
question to its big fair foolish face. How Mr.
Betterman might be this morning, and what sort
of a night he might have had, was what she wanted
to learn — an anxiety very real with her and which,
should she be challenged, would nominally and
decently have brought her ; but her finer interest
was in the possibility that Graham Fielder might
have come.

The clean blank windows, however, merely
gave her the impression of so many showy picture-
frames awaiting their subjects ; even those of them
open to the charming Newport day seemed to tell
her at the most that nothing had happened since
the evening before and that the situation was
still untouched by the change she dreamt of. A
person essentially unobservant of forms, which her
amplitude somehow never found of the right
measure, so that she felt the misfit in many cases
ridiculous, she now passed round the house instead
of applying at the rather grandly gaping portal —
which might in all conscience have accommodated
her — and, crossing a stretch of lawn to the quarter

THE IVORY TOWER

of the place turned to the sea, rested here again
some minutes. She sought indeed after a moment
the support of an elaborately rustic bench that
ministered to ease and contemplation, whence she
would rake much of the rest of the small sloping
domain ; the fair prospect, the great sea spaces,
the line of low receding coast that bristled, either
way she looked, with still more costly " places,"
and in particular the proprietor's wide and
bedimmed verandah, this at present commonly
occupied by her " prowling " father, as she now
always thought of him, though if charged she
would doubtless have admitted with the candour
she was never able to fail of that she herself
prowled during these days of tension quite as
much as he.

He would already have come over, she was well
aware — come over on grounds of his own, which
were quite different from hers ; yet she was scarce
the less struck, off at her point of vantage, with
the way he now sat unconscious of her, at the
outer edge and where the light pointed his presence,
in a low basket-chair which covered him in save for
little more than his small sharp shrunken profile,
detached against the bright further distance, and
his small protrusive foot, crossed over a knee and
agitated by incessant nervous motion whenever
he was thus locked in thought. Seldom had he
more produced for her the appearance from which
she had during the last three years never known

3

THE IVORY TOWER

him to vary and which would have told his story,
all his story, every inch of it and with the last
intensity, she felt, to a spectator capable of being
struck with him as one might after all happen to be
struck. What she herself recognised at any rate,
and really at this particular moment as she had
never done, was how his having retired from active
business, as they said, given up everything and
entered upon the first leisure of his life, had in the
oddest way the effect but of emphasising his ab-
sorption, denying his detachment and presenting
him as steeped up to the chin. Most of all on such
occasions did what his life had meant come home
to her, and then most, frankly, did that meaning
seem small ; it was exactly as the contracted size
of his little huddled figure in the basket-chair.

He was a person without an alternative, and if
any had ever been open to him, at an odd hour or
two, somewhere in his inner dimness, he had long
since closed the gate against it and now revolved
in the hard-rimmed circle from which he had not a
single issue. You couldn't retire without some-
thing or somewhere to retire to, you must have
planted a single tree at least for shade or be able
to turn a key in some yielding door ; but to say
that her extraordinary parent was surrounded by
the desert was almost to flatter the void into which
he invited one to step. He conformed in short
to his necessity of absolute interest — interest, that
is, in his own private facts, which were facts of

4

THE IVORY TOWER

numerical calculation altogether : how could it
not be so when he had dispossessed himself, if
there had even been the slightest selection in the
matter, of every faculty except the calculating ?
If he hadn't thought in figures how could he possibly
have thought at all — and oh the intensity with
which he was thinking at that hour ! It was as if
she literally watched him just then and there dry
up in yet another degree to everything but his
genius. His genius might at the same time have
gathered in to a point of about the size of the end
of a pin. Such at least was the image of these
things, or a part of it, determined for her under
the impression of the moment.

He had come over with the same promptitude
every morning of the last fortnight and had stayed
on nearly till luncheon, sitting about in different
places as if they were equally his own, smoking,
always smoking, the big portentously " special "
cigars that were now the worst thing for him and
lost in the thoughts she had in general long since
ceased to wonder about, taking them now for
granted with an indifference from which the appre-
hension we have noted was but the briefest of
lapses. He had over and above that particular
matter of her passing perception, he had as they
all had, goodness knew, and as she herself must have
done not least, the air of waiting for something he
didn't speak of and in fact couldn't gracefully
mention ; with which moreover the adopted

5

THE IVORY TOWER

practice, and the irrepressible need of it, that she
had been having under her eye, brought out for
her afresh, little as she invited or desired any
renewal of their salience, the several most pointed
parental signs — harmless oddities as she tried to
content herself with calling them, but sharp little
symbols of stubborn little facts as she would have
felt them hadn't she forbidden herself to feel.
She had forbidden herself to feel, but was none the
less as undefended against one of the ugly truths
that hovered there before her in the charming silver
light as against another. That the terrible little
man she watched at his meditations wanted nothing
in the world so much in these hours as to know
what was " going to be left " by the old associate
of his operations and sharer of his spoils — this,
as Mr. Gaw's sole interest in the protracted crisis,
matched quite her certainty of his sense that,
however their doomed friend should pan out, two-
thirds of the show would represent the unholy
profits of the great wrong he himself had originally
suffered.

This she knew was what it meant — that her
father should perch there like a ruffled hawk,
motionless but for his single tremor, with his beak,
which had pecked so many hearts out, visibly
sharper than ever, yet only his talons nervous ;
not that he at last cared a straw, really, but that
he was incapable of thought save in sublimities of
arithmetic, and that the question of what old

6

THE IVORY TOWER

Frank would have done with the fruits of his
swindle, on the occasion of the rupture that had
kept them apart in hate and vituperation for
so many years, was one of the things that could
hold him brooding, day by day and week by
week, after the fashion of a philosopher tangled
in some maze of metaphysics. As the end, for
the other participant in that history, appeared
to draw near, she had with the firmest, wisest
hand she could lay on it patched up the horrid
difference ; had artfully induced her father to
take a house at Newport for the summer, and
then, pleading, insisting, that they should in com-
mon decency, or, otherwise expressed, in view of
the sick man's sore stricken state, meet again, had
won the latter round, unable as he was even then
to do more than shuffle downstairs and take an
occasional drive, to some belief in the sincerity of
her intervention. She had got at him — under
stress of an idea with which her ostensible motive
had nothing to do ; she had obtained entrance,
demanding as all from herself that he should see
her, and had little by little, to the further illumina-
tion of her plan, felt that she made him wonder at
her perhaps more than he had ever wondered at
anything ; so that after this everything else was a
part of that impression.

Strange to say, she had presently found herself
quite independently interested ; more interested
than by any transaction, any chapter of inter-

7

THE IVORY TOWER

course, in her whole specifically filial history. Not
that it mattered indeed if, in all probability—
and positively so far back as during the time of
active hostilities — this friend and enemy of other
days had been predominantly in the right : the
case, at the best and for either party, showed so
scantly for edifying that where was the light in
which her success could have figured as a moral or
a sentimental triumph ? There had been no real
beauty for her, at its apparent highest pitch, in
that walk of the now more complacently valid of
the two men across the Avenue, a walk taken as
she and her companion had continued regularly
to take it since, that he might hold out his so
long clenched hand, under her earnest admonition,
to the antagonist cut into afresh this year by
sharper knives than any even in Gaw's armoury.
They had consented alike to what she wished, and
without knowing why she most wished it : old
Frank, oddly enough, because he liked her, as she
felt, for herself, once she gave him the chance and
took all the trouble ; and her father because — well,
that was an old story. For a long time now, three
or four years at least, she had had, as she would
have said, no difficulty with him ; and she knew
just when, she knew almost just how, the change
had begun to show.

Signal and supreme proof had come to him one
day that save for his big plain quiet daughter
(quiet, that is, unless when she knocked over a light

8

THE IVORY TOWER

gilt chair or swept off a rash table-ornament in
brushing expansively by,) he was absolutely alone
on the human field, utterly unattended by any
betrayal whatever that a fellow-creature could
like him or, when the inevitable day should come,
could disinterestedly miss him. She knew how of
old her inexplicable, her almost ridiculous type
had disconcerted and disappointed him ; but with
this, at a given moment, it had come to him that
she represented quantity and mass, that there was
a great deal of her, so that she would have pressed
down even a balance appointed to weigh bullion ;
and as there was nothing he was fonder of than
such attestations of value he had really ended by
drawing closer to her, as who should say, and by
finding countenance in the breadth of personal
and social shadow that she projected. This was
the sole similitude about him of a living alternative,
and it served only as she herself provided it. He
had actually turned into a personal relation with
her as he might have turned, out of the glare and
the noise and the harsh recognitions of the market,
into some large cool dusky temple ; a place where
idols other than those of his worship vaguely
loomed and gleamed, so that the effect at moments
might be rather awful, but where at least he could
sit very still, could breathe very softly, could look
about obliquely and discreetly, could in fact
wander a little on tiptoe and treat the place, with
a mixture of pride and fear, almost as his own.

9

THE IVORY TOWER

He had brooded and brooded, even as he was
brooding now ; and that habit she at least had in
common with him, though their subjects of thought
were so different. Thus it was exactly that she
began to make out at the time his actual need to
wonder at her, the only fact outside his proper
range that had ever cost him a speculative impulse,
still more a speculative failure ; even as she was
to make it out later on in the case of their Newport
neighbour, and to recognise above all that though
a certain savour of accepted discomfort had, in
the connection, to pervade her father's conscious-
ness, no taste of resentment was needed, as in the
present case, to sweeten it. Nothing had more
interested our intelligent young woman than to
note in each of these overstrained, yet at the same
time safely resting accumulators — and to note it
as a thing unprecedented up to this latest season
— an unexpressed, even though to some extent
invoked, relief under the sense, the confirmed
suspicion, of certain anomalies of ignorance and
indifference as to what they themselves stood for,
anomalies they could scarcely have begun, on the
first glimmer, by so much as taking for realities.
It had become verily, on the part of the poor
bandaged and bolstered and heavily-breathing
object of her present solicitude, as she had found it
on that of his still comparatively agile and intensely
acute critic, the queer mark of an inward relief to
meet, so far as they had arts or terms for it, any

10

THE IVORY TOWER

intimation of what she might have to tell them.
From her they would take things they never could
have taken, and never had, from anyone else.
There were some such intimations that her father,
of old, had only either dodged with discernible art
or directly set his little white face against ; he
hadn't wanted them, and had in fact been afraid
of them — so that after all perhaps his caring so
little what went on in any world not subject to his
direct intelligence might have had the qualification
that he guessed she could imagine, and that to see
her, or at least to feel her, imagine was like the
sense of an odd draught about him when doors
and windows were closed.

Up in the sick man's room the case was quite
other ; she had been admitted there but three
times, very briefly, and a week had elapsed since
the last, yet she had created in him a positive want
to communicate, or at any rate to receive com-
munication. She shouldn't see him again — the
pair of doctors and the trio of nurses had been at
one about that ; but he had caused her to be told
that he liked to know of her coming and hoped
she would make herself quite at home. This she
took for an intended sign, a hint that what she had
in spite of difficulties managed to say now kept him
company in the great bedimmed and disinfected
room from which other society was banished. Her
father in fine he ignored after that not particularly
beautiful moment of bare recognition brought

ii

THE IVORY TOWER

about by her at the bedside ; her father was the
last thing in the world that actually concerned
him. But his not ignoring herself could but have
a positive meaning ; which was that she had made
the impression she sought. Only would Graham
Fielder arrive in time ? She was not in a position
to ask for news of him, but was sure each morning
that if there had been any gage of this Miss
Mumby, the most sympathetic of the nurses and
with whom she had established a working intelli-
gence, would be sufficiently interested to come out
and speak to her. After waiting a while, how-
ever, she recognised that there could be no Miss
Mumby yet and went over to her father in the
great porch.

" Don't you get tired," she put to him, " of
just sitting round here ? "

He turned to her his small neat finely-wrinkled
face, of an extreme yellowish pallor and which
somehow suggested at this end of time an empty
glass that had yet held for years so much strong
wine that a faint golden tinge still lingered on from
it. "I can't get any more tired than I am already."
His tone was flat, weak and so little charged with
petulance that it betrayed the long habit of an
almost exasperating mildness. This effect, at the
same time, so far from suggesting any positive
tradition of civility was somehow that of a common-
ness instantly and peculiarly exposed. " It's a
better place than ours," he added in a moment.

12

THE IVORY TOWER

" But I don't care." And then he went on : "I
guess I'd be more tired in your position."

" Oh you know I'm never tired. And now,"
said Rosanna, " I'm too interested."

" Well then, so am I. Only for me it ain't a
position."

His daughter still hovered with her vague look
about. " Well, if it's one for me I feel it's a good
one. I mean it's the right one."

Mr. Gaw shook his little foot with renewed
intensity, but his irony was not gay. " The right
one isn't always a good one. But ain't the question
what his is going to be ? "

"Mr. Fielder's? Why, of course," said Rosanna
quietly. ' That's the whole interest."

" Well then you've got to fix it."

" I consider that I have fixed it — I mean if we
can hold out."

" Well "—and Mr. Gaw shook on—" I guess /
can. It's pleasant here," he went on, " even if it
is funny."

" Funny ? " his daughter echoed — yet inatten-
tively, for she had become aware of another person,
a middle-aged woman, but with neatly-kept hair
already grizzled and in a white dress covered with
a large white apron, who stood at the nearest
opening of the house. " Here we are, you see,
Miss Mumby — but any news ? " Miss Gaw was
instantly eager.

" Why he's right there upstairs," smiled the
13

THE IVORY TOWER

lady of the apron, who was clearly well affected to
the speaker.

This young woman flushed for pleasure. " Oh
how splendid ! But when did he come ? "

" Early this morning— by the New York boat.
I was up at five, to change with Miss Ruddle, and
there of a sudden were his wheels. He seems so
nice ! " Miss Mumby beamed.

Rosanna's interest visibly rose, though she was
prompt to explain it. " Why it's because he's nice !
And he has seen him ? "

" He's seeing him now — alone. For five minutes.
Not all at once." But Miss Mumby was visibly
serene.

This made Miss Gaw rejoice. " I'm not afraid.
It will do him good. It has got to ! " she finely
declared.

Miss Mumby was so much at ease that she could
even sanction the joke. " More good than the
strain of waiting. They're quite satisfied." Rosanna
knew these judges for Doctor Root and Doctor
Hatch, and felt the support of her friend's firm
freshness. " So we can hope," this authority
concluded.

" Well, let my daughter run it—! " Abel Gaw
had got up as if this change in the situation qualified
certain proprieties, but turned his small sharpness
to Miss Mumby, who had at first produced in him
no change of posture. " Well, if he couldn't stand
me I suppose it was because he knows me — and

14

THE IVORY TOWER

doesn't know this other man. May Mr. Fielder
prove acceptable ! " he added, stepping off the
verandah to the path. But as that left Rosanna's
share in the interest still apparently unlimited
he spoke again. "Is it going to make you settle
over here ? "

This mild irony determined her at once joining
him, and they took leave together of their friend.
" Oh I feel it's right now ! " She smiled back at
Miss Mumby, whose agitation of a confirmatory
hand before disappearing as she had come testified
to the excellence of the understanding between the
ladies, and presently was trailing her light vague
draperies over the grass beside her father. They
might have been taken to resemble as they moved
together a big ship staying its course to allow its
belittled tender to keep near, and the likeness grew
when after a minute Mr. Gaw himself stopped to
address his daughter a question. He had, it was
again marked, so scant a range of intrinsic tone
that he had to resort for emphasis or point to some
other scheme of signs — this surely also of no great
richness, but expressive of his possibilities when
once you knew him. " Is there any reason for your
not telling me why you're so worked up ? "

His companion, as she paused for accommodation,
showed him a large flat grave face in which the
general intention of deference seemed somehow to
confess that it was often at the mercy — and perhaps
most in this particular relation — of such an inward

THE IVORY TOWER

habit of the far excursion as could but incorrigibly
qualify for Rosanna Gaw certain of the forms of
attention, certain of the necessities of manner.
She was, sketchily speaking, so much higher-piled
a person than her father that the filial attitude in
her suffered at the best from the occasional air of
her having to come down to him. You would have
guessed that she was not a person to cultivate that
air ; and perhaps even if very acute would have
guessed some other things bearing on the matter
from the little man's careful way with her. This
pair exhibited there in the great light of the summer
Sunday morning more than one of the essential,
or perhaps the rather finally constituted, con-
ditions of their intercourse. Here was a parent
who clearly appealed to nobody in the world but
his child, and a child who condescended to nobody
in the world but her parent ; and this with the
anomaly of a constant care not to be too humble
on one side and an equal one not to be too proud
on the other. Rosanna, her powerful exposed arm
raised to her broad shoulder, slowly made her
heavy parasol revolve, flinging with it a wide
shadow that enclosed them together, for their
question and answer, as in a great bestreamered
tent. " Do I strike you as worked up ? Why I've
tried to keep as quiet about it as I possibly could—
as one does when one wants a thing so tremendously
much."

His eyes had been raised to her own, but after she
16

THE IVORY TOWER

had said this in her perfunctory way they sank
as from a sense of shyness and might have rested
for a little on one of their tent-pegs. " Well,
daughter, that's just what I want to understand
— your personal motive."

She gave a sigh for this, a strange uninforming
sigh. " Ah father, ' my personal motives ' ! "

With this she might have walked on, but when
he barred the way it was as if she could have done
so but by stepping on him. " I don't complain
of your personal motives — I want you to have all
you're entitled to and should like to know who's
entitled to more. But couldn't you have a reason
once in a while for letting me know what some of
your reasons are ? "

Her decent blandness dropped on him again,
and she had clearly this time come further to meet
him. " You've always wanted me to have things
I don't care for — though really when you've made
a great point of it I've often tried. But want me
now to have this." And then as he watched her
again to learn what " this," with the visibly rare
importance she attached to it, might be : "To
make up to a person for a wrong I once did him."

" You wronged the man who has come ? "

" Oh dreadfully ! " Rosanna said with great
sweetness.

He evidently held that any notice taken of any-
one, to whatever effect, by this great daughter of
his was nothing less than an honour done, and
B 17

THE IVORY TOWER

probably overdone ; so what preposterous " wrong "
could count ? The worst he could think of was
still but a sign of her greatness. " You wouldn't
have him round — - ? "

" Oh that would have been nothing ! " she
laughed ; and this time she sailed on again.

II

ROSANNA found him again after luncheon shaking
his little foot from the depths of a piazza chair,
but now on their own scene and at a point where
this particular feature of it, the cool spreading
verandah, commanded the low green cliff and a
part of the immediate approach to the house from
the seaward side. She left him to the only range
of thought of which he was at present capable —
she was so perfectly able to follow it ; and it had
become for that matter an old story that as he
never opened a book, nor sought a chance for talk,
nor took a step of exercise, nor gave in any manner
a sign of an unsatisfied want, the extent of his
vacancy, a detachment in which there just breathed
a hint of the dryly invidious, might thus remain
unbroken for hours. She knew what he was wait-
ing for, and that if she hadn't been there to see
him he would take his way across to the other house
again, where the plea of solicitude for his old
friend's state put him at his ease and where,

18

THE IVORY TOWER

moreover, as she now felt, the possibility of a sight
of Graham Fielder might reward him. It was
disagreeable to her that he should have such a sight
while she denied it to her own eyes ; but the sense
of their common want of application for their
faculties was a thing that repeatedly checked in
her the expression of judgments. Their idleness
was as mean and bare on her own side, she too
much felt, as on his ; and heaven knew that if he
could sit with screwed-up eyes for hours the case
was as flagrant in her aimless driftings, her in-
curable restless revolutions, as a pretence of
" interests " could consort with.

She revolved and drifted then, out of his sight
and in another quarter of the place, till four o'clock
had passed ; when on returning to him she found
his chair empty and was sure of what had become
of him. There was nothing else in fact for his
Sunday, as he on that day denied himself the
resource of driving, or rather of being driven, from
which the claim of the mechanical car had not,
in the Newport connection, won him, and which,
deep in his barouche, behind his own admirable
horses, could maintain him in meditation for medi-
tation's sake quite as well as a poised rocking-chair.
Left thus to herself, though conscious she well
might have visitors, she circled slowly and repeatedly
round the gallery, only pausing at last on sight of
a gentleman who had come into view by a path from
the cliff. He presented himself in a minute as Davey

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THE IVORY TOWER

Bradham, and on drawing nearer called across to her
without other greeting : " Won't you walk back
with me to tea ? Gussy has sent me to bring you."

" Why yes, of course I will — that's nice of
Gussy," she replied ; adding moreover that she
wanted a walk, and feeling in the prospect, though
she didn't express this, a relief to her tension and
a sanction for what she called to herself her tact.
She might without the diversion not quite have
trusted herself not to emulate, and even with the
last crudity, her father's proceeding ; which she
knew she should afterwards be ashamed of. "Any-
one that comes here," she said, " must come on to
you — they'll know; " and when Davey had replied
that there wasn't the least chance of anyone's
not coming on she moved with him down the
path, at the end of which they entered upon the
charming cliff walk, a vast carpet of undivided
lawns, kept in wondrous condition, with a meander-
ing right-of-way for a seaward fringe and bristling
wide-winged villas that spoke of a seated colony ;
many of these huge presences reducing to marginal
meanness their strip of the carpet.

Davey was, like herself, richly and healthily
replete, though with less of his substance in stature ;
a frankly fat gentleman, blooming still at eight-
and-forty, with a large smooth shining face, void
of a sign of moustache or whisker and crowned
with dense dark hair cropped close to his head
after the fashion of a French schoolboy or the

20

THE IVORY TOWER

inmate of a jail. But for his half-a-dozen fixed
wrinkles, as marked as the great rivers of a con-
tinent on a map, and his thick and arched and
active eyebrows, which left almost nothing over
for his .forehead, he would have scarce exhibited
features — in spite of the absence of which, however,
he could look in alternation the most portentous
things and the most ridiculous. He would hang
up a meaning in his large empty face as if he had
swung an awful example on a gibbet, or would let
loose there a great grin that you somehow couldn't
catch in the fact but that pervaded his expanses
of cheek as poured wine pervades water. He
differed certainly from Rosanna in that he enjoyed,
visibly, all he carnally possessed — whereas you
could see in a moment that she, poor young woman,
would have been content with, would have been
glad of, a scantier allowance. " You'll find Cissy
Foy, to begin with," he said as they went ; " she
arrived last night and told me to tell you she'd
have walked over with me but that Gussy wants
her for something. However, as you know, Gussy
always wants her for something — she wants every-
one for something so much more than something
for everyone — and there are none of us that are
not worked hard, even though we mayn't bloom
on it like Cissy, who, by the way, is looking a
perfect vision."

" Awfully lovely ? " — Rosanna clearly saw as
she asked.

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" Prettier than at any time yet, and wanting
tremendously to hear from you, you know, about
your protege — what's the fellow's name ? Graham
Fielder ? — whose arrival we're all agog about."

Rosanna pulled up in the path ; she somehow
at once felt her possession of this interest clouded
— shared as yet as it had been only with her father,
whose share she could control. It then and there
came to her in one of the waves of disproportionate
despair in which she felt half the impressions of
life break, that she wasn't going to be able to
control at all the great- participations. She had a
moment of reaction against what she had done ;
she liked Gray to be called her protege — forced
upon her as endless numbers of such were, he would
be the only one in the whole collection who hadn't
himself pushed at her ; but with the big bright
picture of the villas, the palaces, the lawns and
the luxuries in her eyes, and with something like
the chink of money itself in the murmur of the
breezy little waves at the foot of the cliff, she felt
that, without her having thought of it enough in
advance, she had handed him over to complica-
tions and relations. These things shimmered in
the silver air of the wondrous perspective ahead,
the region off there that awaited her present ap-
proach and where Gussy hovered like a bustling
goddess in the enveloping cloud of her court. The
man beside her was the massive Mercury of this
urgent Juno ; but — without mythological com-

22

THE IVORY TOWER

parisons, which we make for her under no hint
that she could herself have dreamed of one — she
found herself glad just then that she liked Davey
Bradham, and much less sorry than usual that she
didn't respect him. An extraordinary thing
happened, and all in the instant before she spoke
again. It was very strange, and it made him look
at her as if he wondered that his words should
have had so great an effect as even her still face
showed. There was absolutely no one, roundabout
and far and wide, whom she positively wanted
Graham to know ; no not one creature of them
all — " all " figuring for her, while she stood, the
great collection at the Bradhams'. She hadn't
thought of this before in the least as it came to her
now ; yet no more had she time to be sure that
even with the sharper consciousness she would,
as her father was apt to say, have acted different.
So much was true, yet while she still a moment
longer hung fire Davey rounded himself there
like something she could comparatively rest on.
" How in the world," she put to him then, " do you
know anything away off there — ? He has come to his
uncle, but so quietly that I haven't yet seen him."

" Why, my dear thing, is it new to you that
we're up and doing — bright and lively ? We're
the most intelligent community on all this great
coast, and when precious knowledge is in the air
we're not to be kept from it. We knew at break-
fast that the New York boat had brought him,

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THE IVORY TOWER

and Gussy of course wants him up to dinner
to-night. Only Cissy claims, you see, that she has
rights in him first — rights beyond Gussy's, I mean/'
Davey went on ; "I don't know that she claims
them beyond yours."

She looked abroad again, his companion, to earth
and sea and sky ; she wondered and felt threatened,
yet knowing herself at the same time a long way
off from the point at which menace roused her to
passion. She had always to suffer so much before
that, and was for the present in the phase of feeling
but weak and a little sick. But there was always
Davey. She started their walk again before say-
ing more, while he himself said things that she
didn't heed. " I can't for the life of me imagine,"
she nevertheless at last declared, " what Cissy
has to do with him. When and where has she ever
seen him ? "

Davey did as always his best to oblige. " Some-
where abroad, some time back, when she was with
her mother at some baths or some cure-place.
Though when I think of it," he added, " it wasn't
with the man himself — it was with some relation :
hasn't he an uncle, or perhaps a stepfather ? Cissy
seems to know all about him, and he takes a great
interest in her."

It again all but stopped Rosanna. " Gray
Fielder an interest in Cissy ? "

" Let me not," laughed Davey, " sow any seed
of trouble or engage for more than I can stand to.

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She'll tell you all about it, she'll clothe it in every
grace. Only I assure you I myself am as much
interested as anyone," he added — " interested,
I mean, in the question of whether the old man
there has really brought him out at the last gasp
this way to do some decent thing about him. An
impression prevails," he further explained, " that
you're in some wonderful way in the old wretch's
confidence, and I therefore make no bones of
telling you that your arrival on our scene there,
since you're so good as to consent to come, has
created an impatience beyond even what your
appearances naturally everywhere create. I give
you warning that there's no limit to what we want
to know."

Rosanna took this in now as she so often took
things — working it down in silence at first : it
shared in the general weight of all direct contri-
butions to her consciousness. It might then, when
she spoke, have sunk deep. She looked about
again, in her way, as if under her constant oppres-
sion, and seeing, a little off from their gravelled
walk, a public bench to which a possible path
branched down, she said, on a visibly grave
decision : " Look here, I want to talk to you —
you're one of the few people in all your crowd to
whom I really can. So come and sit down."

Davey Bradham, arrested before her, had an
air for his responsibilities that quite matched her
own. " Then what becomes of them all there ? "

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THE IVORY TOWER

" I don't care a hang what becomes of them.
But if you want to know," Rosanna said, " I do
care what becomes of Mr. Fielder, and I trust you
enough, being as you are the only one of your lot
I do trust, to help me perhaps a little to do some-
thing about it."

" Oh, my dear lady, I'm not a bit discreet, you
know," Mr. Bradham amusedly protested ; "I'm
perfectly unprincipled and utterly indelicate. How
can a fellow not be who likes as much as I do at
all times to make the kettle boil and the plot
thicken ? I've only got my beautiful intelligence,
though, as I say, I don't in the least want to embroil
you. Therefore if I can really help you as the
biggest babbler alive ! "

She waited again a little, but this time with her
eyes on his good worn worldly face, superficially
so smooth, but with the sense of it lined and
scratched and hacked across much in the manner
of the hard ice of a large pond at the end of a long
day's skating. The amount of obstreperous exer-
cise that had been taken on that recording field !
The difference between our pair, thus confronted,
might have been felt as the greater by the very
fact of their outward likeness as creatures so
materially weighted ; it would have been written
all over Rosanna for the considering eye that every
grain of her load, from innermost soul to outer-
most sense, was that of reality and sincerity ;
whereas it might by the same token have been

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THE IVORY TOWER

felt of Davey that in the temperature of life as he
knew it his personal identity had been, save for
perhaps some small tough lurking residuum,
long since puffed away in pleasant spirals of vapour.
Our young woman was at this moment, however,
less interested in quantities than in qualities of
candour ; she could get what passed for it by the
bushel, by the ton, whenever, right or left, she
chose to chink her pocket. Her requirement for
actual use was such a glimmer from the candle of
truth as a mere poor woman might have managed
to kindle. What was left of precious in Davey
might thus have figured but as a candle-end ; yet
for the lack of it she should perhaps move in dark-
ness. And her brief intensity of watch was in a
moment rewarded ; her companion's candle-end
was his not quite burnt-out value as a gentleman.
This was enough for her, and she seemed to see
her way. " If I don't trust you there's nobody
else in all the wide world I can. So you've got
to know, and you've got to be good to me."

' Then what awful thing have you done ? " he
was saying to her three minutes after they had
taken their place temporarily on the bench.

" WeU, I got at Mr. Betterman," she said, " in
spite of all the difficulty. Father and he hadn't
spoken for years — had had long ago the blackest,
ugliest difference ; believing apparently the
horridest things of each other. Nevertheless it
was as father's daughter that I went to him—

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THE IVORY TOWER

though after a little, I think, it was simply for
the worth itself of what I had to tell him that
he listened to me."

" And what you had to tell him," Davey asked
while she kept her eyes on the far horizon, " was then
that you take this tender interest in Mr. Fielder ? "

" You may make my interest as ridiculous as
you like ! "

" Ah my dear thing," Davey pleadingly pro-
tested, " don't deprive me, please, of anything
nice there is to know ! "

" There was something that had happened years
ago — a wrong I perhaps had done him, though in
perfect good faith. I thought I saw my way to
make up for it, and I seem to have succeeded
beyond even what I hoped."

" Then what have you to worry about ? " said
Davey.

" Just my success," she answered simply. " Here
he is and I've done it."

" Made his rich uncle want him — who hadn't
wanted him before ? Is that it ? "

" Yes, interfered afresh in his behalf — as I had
interfered long ago. When one has interfered
one can't help wondering," she gravely explained.

" But dear lady, ever for his benefit of course,"
Davey extemporised.

"Yes — except for the uncertainty of what is
for a person's benefit. It's hard enough to know,"
said Rosanna, " what's for one's own."

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THE IVORY TOWER

" Oh, as to that/' Davey joked, " I don't think
that where mine's concerned I've ever a doubt !
But is the point that the old man had quarrelled
with him and that you've brought about a re-
conciliation ? "

She considered again with her far-wandering
eyes ; as if both moved by her impulse to con-
fidence and weighted with the sense of how much
of it there all was. " Well, in as few words as
possible, it was like this. He's the son but of a
half-sister, the daughter of Mr. Betterman's father
by a second marriage which he in his youth hadn't
at all liked, and who made her case worse with him,
as time went on, by marrying a man, Graham's
father, whom he had also some strong objection
to. Yes," she summarized, " he seems to have
been difficult to please, but he's making up for it
now. His brother-in-law didn't live long to suffer
from the objection, and the sister, Mrs. Fielder,
left a widow badly provided for, went off with her
boy, then very young, to Europe. There, later
on, during a couple of years that I spent abroad
with my mother, we met them and for the time
saw much of them ; she and my dear mother
greatly took to each other, they formed the friend-
liest relation, and we had in common that my
father's business association with Mr. Betterman
still at that time subsisted, though the terrible
man — as he then was — hadn't at all made it up
with our friend. It was while we were with her

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THE IVORY TOWER

in Dresden, however, that something happened
which brought about, by correspondence, some
renewal of intercourse. This was a matter on
, which we were in her confidence and in which we
took the greatest interest, for we liked also the
other person concerned in it. An opportunity
had come up for her to marry again, she had
practically decided to embrace it, and of this,
though everything between them had broken
off so short, her unforgiving brother had heard,
indirectly, in New York."

Davey Bradham, lighting cigarettes, and having
originally placed his case, in a manner promptly
appreciated, at his companion's disposal, crowned
this now adjusted relation with a pertinence of
comment. " And only again of course to be as
horrid as possible about it ! He hated husbands
in general."

" Well, he himself, it was to be said, had been
but little of one. He had lost his own wife early
and hadn't married again — though he was to lose
early also the two children born to him. The
second of these deaths was recent at the time I
speak of, and had had to do, I imagine, with his
sudden overture to his absent relations. He let his
sister know that he had learnt her intention and
thought very ill of it, but also that if she would
get rid of her low foreigner and come back with
the boy he would be happy to see what could be
done for them."

3°

THE IVORY TOWER

"What a jolly situation !" — Davey exhaled
fine puffs. " Her second choice then — at Dresden
— was a German adventurer ? "

" No, an English one, Mr. Northover ; an ad-
venturer only as a man in love is always one, I
suppose, and who was there for us to see and
extremely to approve. He had nothing to do with
Dresden beyond having come on to join her ; they
had met elsewhere, in Switzerland or the Tyrol,
and he had shown an interest in her, and had made
his own impression, from the first. She answered
her brother that his demand of her was excessive
in the absence of anything she could recognise
that she owed him. To this he replied that she
might marry then whom she liked, but that if she
would give up her boy and send him home, where
he would take charge of him and bring him up to
prospects she would be a fool not to appreciate,
there need be no more talk and she could lead her
life as she perversely preferred. This crisis came
up during our winter with her — it was a very cruel
one, and my mother, as I have said, was all in her
confidence/'

" Of course " — Davey Bradham abounded ; " and
you were all in your mother's ! "

Rosanna leaned back on the bench, her cigarette
between her strong and rounded fingers ; she sat
at her ease now, this chapter of history filling,
under her view, the soft lap of space and the comfort
of having it well out, and yet of keeping it, as her

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THE IVORY TOWER

friend somehow helped her to do, well within her
control, more and more operative. " Well, I was
sixteen years old, and Gray at that time fourteen.
I was huge and hideous and began then to enjoy
the advantage — if advantage it was — of its seem-
ing so ridiculous to treat the monster I had grown
as negligible that I had to be treated as important.
I wasn't a bit stupider than I am now — in fact I
saw things much more sharply and simply and
knew ever so much better what I wanted and
didn't. Gray and I had become excellent friends
—if you want to think of him as my ' first
passion ' you are welcome to, unless you want
to think of him rather as my fifth ! He was
a charming little boy, much nicer than any I
had ever seen ; he didn't come up higher than
my shoulder, and, to tell you all, I remember
how once, in some game with a party of English
and American children whom my mother had
got together for Christmas, I tried to be amusing
by carrying half-a-dozen of them successively on
my back — all in order to have the pleasure of
carrying him, whom I felt, I remember, but as a
feather-weight compared with most of the others.
Such a romp was I — as you can of course see I
must have been, and at the same time so horridly
artful ; which is doubtless now not so easy for
you to believe of me. But the point," Rosanna
developed, " is that I entered all the way into our
friends' situation and that when I was with my

32

THE IVORY TOWER

mother alone we talked for the time of nothing
else. The strange, or at least the certain, thing
was that though we should have liked so to have
them over here, we hated to see them hustled
even by a rich relative : we were rich ourselves,
though we rather hated that too, and there was
no romance for us in being so stuffed up. We
liked Mr. Northover, their so devoted friend, we
saw how they cared for him, how even Graham did,
and what an interest he took in the boy, for whom
we felt that a happy association with him, each of
them so open to it, would be a great thing ; we
threw ourselves in short, and I dare say to extrava-
gance, into the idea of the success of Mr. North-
over's suit. She was the charmingest little woman,
very pretty, very lonely, very vague, but very
sympathetic, and we perfectly understood that
the pleasant Englishman, of great taste and
thoroughly a gentleman, should have felt en-
couraged. We didn't in the least adore Mr. Better-
man, between whom and my father the differences
that afterwards became so bad were already
threatening, and when I saw for myself how the
life that might thus be opened to him where they
were, with his mother's marriage and a further
good influence crowning it, would compare with
the awful game of grab, to express it mildly, for
which I was sure his uncle proposed to train him,
I took upon myself to get more roused and wound-
up than I had doubtless any real right to, and

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THE IVORY TOWER

to wonder what I might really do to promote
the benefit that struck me as the greater and
defeat the one against which my prejudice was
strong."

She had drawn up a moment as if what was to
come required her to gather herself, while her
companion seemed to assure her by the backward
set of his head, that of a man drinking at a cool
spout, how little his attention had lapsed. "I see
at once, you dear grand creature, that you were
from that moment at the bottom of everything
that was to happen ; and without knowing yet
what these things were I back you for it now up
to the hilt."

" Well," she said, " I'm much obliged, and you're
never for an instant, mind, to fail me ; but I needed
no backing then — I didn't even need my mother's :
I took on myself so much from the moment my
chance turned up."

' You just walked in and settled the whole
question, of course." He quite flaunted the luxury
of his interest. " Clearly what moved you was
one of those crowning passions of infancy."

" Then why didn't I want, on the contrary,
to have him, poor boy, where his presence would
feed my flame ? " Rosanna at once inquired. " Why
didn't I obtain of my mother to say to his — for
she would have said anything in the world I wanted :
' You just quietly get married, don't disappoint
this delightful man ; while we take Gray back to

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THE IVORY TOWER

his uncle, which will be awfully good for him, and
let him learn to make his fortune, the decent women
that we are fondly befriending him and you and
your husband coming over whenever you like,
to see how beautifully it answers/ Why if I was
so infatuated didn't I db that ? " she repeated.

He kept her waiting not a moment. " Just
because you were so infatuated. Just because
when you're infatuated you're sublime." She had
turned her eyes on him, facing his gorgeous hos-
pitality, but facing it with a visible flush. " Rosanna
Gaw " — he took undisguised advantage of her —
" you're sublime now, just as sublime as you can
be, and it's what you want to be. You liked you
young man so much that you were really
capable ! "

He let it go at that, for even with his drop she
had not completed his sense. But the next thing,
practically, she did so. " I've been capable ever
since — that's the point : of feeling that I did act
upon him, that, young and accessible as I found
him, I gave a turn to his life."

" Well," Davey continued to comment, " he's
not so young now, and no more, naturally, are
you ; but I guess, all the same, you'll give many
another." And then, as facing him altogether
more now, she seemed to ask how he could be so
sure : r' Why, if I'm so accessible, through my
tough old hide, how is the exquisite creature formed
to all the sensibilities for which you sought to

35

THE IVORY TOWER

provide going in the least to hold out ? He owes
you clearly everything he has become, and how
can he decently not want you should know he
feels it ? All's well that ends well : that at least
I foresee I shall want to say when I've had more
of the beginning. You were going to tell me how
it was in particular that you got your pull."

She puffed and puffed again, letting her eyes
once more wander and rest ; after which, through
her smoke, she recovered the sense of the past.
" One Sunday morning we went together to the
great Gallery — it had been between us for weeks
that he was some day to take me and show me
the things he most admired : that wasn't at all
what would have been my line with him. The
extent to which he was ' cleverer ' than I and knew
about the things I didn't, and don't know even

now ! " Greatly she made this point. " And

yet the beauty was that I felt there were ways I
could help him, all the same — I knew that even
with all the things I didn't know, so that they
remained ignorances of which I think I wasn't a
bit ashamed : any more in fact than I am now,
there being too many things else to be ashamed
of. Never so much as that day, at any rate, had
I felt ready for my part — yes, it came to me there
as my part ; for after he had called for me at our
hotel and we had started together I knew something
particular was the matter and that he of a sudden
didn't care for what we were doing, though we

36

THE IVORY TOWER

had planned it as a great occasion much before ;
that in short his thoughts were elsewhere and
that I could have made out the trouble in his face
if I hadn't wished not to seem to look for it. I
hated that he should have it, whatever it was —
just how I hated it comes back to me as if from
yesterday ; and also how at the same time I pre-
tended not to notice, and he attempted not to
show he did, but to introduce me, in the rooms,
to what we had come for instead — which gave us
half-an-hour that I recover vividly, recover, I
assure you, quite painfully still, as a conscious,
solemn little farce. What put an end to it was
that we at last wandered away from the great
things, the famous Madonna, the Correggio, the
Paul Veroneses, which he had quavered out the
properest remarks about, and got off into a small
room of little Dutch and other later masters,
things that didn't matter and that we couldn't
pretend to go into, but where the German sunshine
of a bright winter day came down through some
upper light and played on all the rich little old
colour and old gilding after a fashion that of a
sudden decided me. 'I don't care a hang for
anything ! ' I stood before him and boldly spoke
out : ' I haven't cared a hang since we came in,
if you want to know — I care only for what you're
worried about, and what must be pretty bad,
since I can see, if you don't mind my saying it,
that it has made you cry at home.' '

37

THE IVORY TOWER

" He can hardly have thanked you for that \ "
Davey's competence threw off.

" No, he didn't pretend to, and I had known he
wouldn't ; he hadn't to tell me how a boy feels in
taking such a charge from a girl. But there he was
on a small divan, swinging his legs a little and
with his head— he had taken his hat off— back
against the top of the seat and the queerest look
in his flushed face. For a moment he stared hard,
and then at least, I said to myself, his tears were
coming up. They didn't come, however — he only
kept glaring as in fever ; from which I presently
saw that I had said not a bit the wrong thing, but
exactly the very best. ' Oh if I were some good
to you ! ' I went on — and with the sense the next
moment, ever so happily, that that was really
what I was being. ' She has put it upon me to
choose for myself — to think, to decide and to
settle it that way for both of us. She has put it
all upon me,' he said — ' and how can I choose, in
such a difficulty,' he asked, ' when she tells me,
and when I believe, that she'll do exactly as I say ? '
' You mean your mother will marry Mr. North-
over or give him up according as you prefer ? '
—but of course I knew what he meant. It was a
joy to me to feel it clear up — with the good I had
already done him, at a touch, by making him
speak. I saw how this relieved him even when he
practically spoke of his question as too frightful
for his young intelligence, his young conscience

38

THE IVORY TOWER

— literally his young nerves. It was as if he had
appealed to me to pronounce it positively cruel
—while I had felt at the first word that I really
but blessed it. It wasn't too much for my young
nerves — extraordinary as it may seem to you/'
Rosanna pursued, " that I should but have wished
to undertake at a jump such a very large order.
I wonder now from where my lucidity came, but
just as I stood there I saw some things in a light
in which, even with still better opportunities, I've
never so much seen them since. It was as if I took
everything in — and what everything meant ; and,
flopped there on his seat and always staring up at
me, he understood that I was somehow inspired
for him."

" My dear child, you're inspired at this moment ! "
— Davey Bradham rendered the tribute. " It's
too splendid to hear of amid our greedy wants,
our timid ideas and our fishy passions. You ring
out like Briinnhilde at the opera. How jolly to
have pronounced his doom ! "

" Yes," she gravely said, " and you see how jolly
I now find it. I settled it. I was fate," Rosanna
puffed. " He recognised fate — all the more that
he really wanted to ; and you see therefore,"
she went on, " how it was to be in every single
thing that has happened since."

" You stuck him fast there " — Mr. Bradham
filled in the picture. " Yet not so fast after all,"
he understandingly added, " but that you've been

39

THE IVORY TOWER

able to handle him again as you like. He does
in other words whatever you prescribe."

"If he did it then I don't know what I should
have done had he refused to do it now. For now
everything's changed. Everyone's dead or dying.
And I believe," she wound up, " that I was quite
right then, that he has led his life and been happy."

" I see. If he hadn't been— - ! " Her com-
panion's free glance ranged.

" He would have had me to thank, yes. And
at the best I should have cost him much ! "

" Everything, you mean, that the old man had
more or less from the first in mind ? "

Davey had taken her up ; but the next moment,
without direct reply, she was on her feet. " At
any rate you see ! " she said to finish with it.

" Oh I see a lot ! And if there's more in it than
meets the eye I think I see that too," her friend
declared. " I want to see it all at any rate — and
just as you've started it. But what I want most
naturally is to see your little darling himself."

" Well, if I had been afraid of you I wouldn't
have spoken. You won't hurt him," Rosanna
said as they got back to the cliff walk.

" Hurt him ? Why I shall be his great warning
light — or at least I shall be yours, which is better
still." To this, however, always pondering, she
answered nothing, but stood as if spent by her
effort and half disposed in consequence to retrace
her steps ; against which possibility he at once

40

THE IVORY TOWER

protested. " You don't mean you're not coming
on?"

She thought another instant ; then her eyes
overreached the long smooth interval beyond
which the nondescript excrescences of Gussy's
" cottage," vast and florid, and in a kindred com-
pany of hunches and gables and pinnacles confessed,
even if in confused accents, to its monstrous identity.
The sight itself seemed after all to give her resolu-
tion. " Yes, now for Cissy ! " she said and braved
the prospect.

Ill

HALF-AN-HOUR later, however, she still had this
young lady before her in extended perspective
and as a satisfaction, if not as an embarrassment,
to come ; thanks to the fact that Mrs. Bradham
had forty persons, or something like it, though
all casually turning up, at tea, and that she her-
self had perhaps never been so struck with the
activity of the charming girl's response to the
considerations familiar alike to all of them as
Gussy's ideas about her. Gussy's ideas about her,
as about everything in the world, could on occasion
do more to fill the air of any scene over which
Gussy presided than no matter what vociferation
of any massed crowd surrounding that lady :
exactly which truth might have been notable now
to Rosanna in the light of Cissy's occasional clear

41

THE IVORY TOWER

smile atJher, always^as yet from a distance, during
lapses of intervals and across shifting barriers of
the more or less eminent and brilliant. Mrs.
Bradham's great idea — notoriously the most dis-
interested Gussy had been known, through a
career rich in announced intentions and glorious
designs, to entertain with any coherence — was
that by placing and keeping on exhibition, under
her eye, the loveliest flower of girlhood a splendid
and confident society could have wished to wear
on its bosom she should at once signally enhance
the dignity of the social part played by herself
and steep the precious object in a medium in which
the care of precious objects was supremely under-
stood. " When she does so much for me what in
the world mustn't I do for her ? " Cecilia Foy
had put that to Rosanna again and again with
perfect lucidity, making her sense of fair play shine
out of it and her cultivation of that ideal form
perhaps not the least of the complications under
which our elder young woman, earnest in every-
thing, endeavoured to stick to the just view of her.
Cissy had from the first appealed to her with re-
strictions, but that was the way in which for poor
brooding Rosanna every one appealed ; only there
was in the present case the difference that whereas
in most cases the appeal, or rather her view of it,
found itself somehow smothered in the attendant
wrong possibilities, the interest of this bright
victim of Mrs. Bradham's furtherance worked

42

THE IVORY TOWER

clearer, on the whole, with the closer, with the
closest, relation, never starting the questions one
might entertain about her except to dispose of
them, even if when they had been disposed of
she mostly started them again.

Not often had so big a one at all events been
started for Rosanna as when she saw the girl earn
her keep, as they had so often called it together,
by multiplying herself for everyone else about the
place instead of remaining as single and possess-
able as her anxious friend had come over to invite
her to be. Present to this observer to the last point
indeed, and yet as nothing new, was the impression
of that insolence of ease on Gussy's part which was
never so great as when her sense for any relation
was least fine and least true. She was naturally
never so the vulgar rich woman able to afford
herself all luxuries as when she was most stupid
about the right enjoyment of these and most
brutally systematic, as Rosanna's inward voice
phrased the matter, for some inferior and dese-
crating use of them. Mrs. Bradham would deeply
have resented — as deeply as a woman might who
had no depth — any imputation on her view of what
would be fine and great for her young friend, but
Rosanna's envy and admiration of possibilities,
to say nothing of actualities, to which this view
was quite blind, kept the girl before her at times
as a sacrificed, truly an even prostituted creature ;
who yet also, it had to be added, could often

43

THE IVORY TOWER

alienate sympathy by strange, by perverse con-
currences. However, Rosanna thought, Cissy
wasn't in concurrence now, but was quite otherwise
preoccupied than with what their hostess could
either give her or take from her. She was happy —
this our young woman perfectly perceived, to her
own very great increase of interest ; so happy that,
as had been repeatedly noticeable before, she
multiplied herself through the very agitation of
it, appearing to be, for particular things they had
to say to her, particular conversational grabs and
snatches, all of the most violent, they kept attempt-
ing and mostly achieving, at the service of everyone
at once, and thereby as obliging, as humane a
beauty, after the fashion of the old term, as could
have charmed the sight. What Rosanna most
noted withal, and not for the first time either,
every observation she had hitherto made seeming
now but intensified, what she most noted was the
huge general familiarity, the pitch of intimacy
unmodulated, as if exactly the same tie, from
person to person, bound the whole company to-
gether and nobody had anything to say to anyone
that wasn't equally in question for all.

This, she knew, was the air and the sound, the
common state, of intimacy, and again and again,
in taking it in, she had remained unsure of whether
it left her more hopelessly jealous or more rudely
independent. She would have liked to be intimate
—with someone or other, not indeed with every

44

THE IVORY TOWER

member of a crowd ; but the faculty, as appeared,
hadn't been given her (for with whom had she ever
exercised it ? not even with Cissy, she felt now,)
and it was ground on which she knew alternate
languor and relief. The fact, however, that so
much as all this could be present to her while she
encountered greetings, accepted tea, and failed of
felicity before forms of address for the most part
so hilarious, or at least so ingenious, as to remind
her further that she might never expect to be
funny either — that fact might have shown her
as hugging a treasure of consciousness rather than
as seeking a soil for its interment. What they all
took for granted ! — this again and again had been
before her ; and never so as when Gussy Bradham
after a little became possessed of her to the extent
of their sharing a settee in one of the great porches
on the lawny margin of which, before sundry over-
archings in other and quite contradictious archi-
tectural interests began to spread, a dozen dispersed
couples and trios revolved and lingered in sight.
How was he, the young man at the other house,
going to like these enormous assumptions ?—
that of a sudden oddly came to her ; so far indeed
as it was odd that Gussy should suggest such
questions. She suggested questions in her own
way at all times ; Rosanna indeed mostly saw
her in a sort of immodest glare of such, the chief
being doubtless the wonder, never assuaged, of
how any circle of the supposed amenities could

45

THE IVORY TOWER

go on " putting up " with her. The present was
as a fact perhaps the first time our young woman
had seen her in the light of a danger to herself.
If society, or what they called such, had to reckon
with her and accepted the charge, that was society's
own affair — it appeared on the whole to understand
its interest ; but why should she, Rosanna Gaw,
recognise a complication she had done nothing
ever to provoke ? It was literally as if the reckon-
ing sat there between them and all the terms they
had ever made with felt differences, intensities of
separation and opposition, had now been super-
seded by the need for fresh ones — forms of contact
and exchange, forms of pretended intercourse,
to be improvised in presence of new truths.

So it was at any rate that Rosanna' s imagina-
tion worked while she asked herself if there mightn't
be something in an idea she had more than once
austerely harboured — the possibility that Mrs.
Bradham could on occasion be afraid of her. If
this lady's great note was that of an astounding
assurance based on approved impunity, how,
certainly, should a plain dull shy spinster, with
an entire incapacity for boldness and a perfect
horror, in general, of intermeddling, have broken
the spell ? — especially as there was no other person
in the world, not one, whom she could have dreamed
of wishing to put in fear. Deep was the discomfort
for Miss Gaw of losing with her entertainer the
commonest advantage she perhaps knew, that of

46

THE IVORY TOWER

her habit of escape from the relation of dislike,
let alone of hostility, through some active denial
for the time of any relation at all. What was
there in Gussy that rendered impossible to
Rosanna's sense this very vulgarest of luxuries ?
She gave her always the impression of looking
at her with an exaggeration of ease, a guarded
penetration, that consciously betrayed itself ;
though how could one know, after all, that this
wasn't the horrid nature of her look for every-
one ? — which would have been publicly denounced
if people hadn't been too much involved with
her to be candid. With her wondrous bloom of
life and health and her hard confidence that
had nothing to do with sympathy, Gussy might
have presented it as a matter of some pusillan-
imity, her present critic at the same time felt,
that one should but detect the displeasing in
such an exhibition of bright activity. The only
way not to stand off from her, no doubt, was
to be of her " bossed " party and crew, or in
other words to be like everyone else ; and
perhaps one might on that condition have
enjoyed as a work of nature or even of art,
an example of all-efficient force, her braveries of
aspect and attitude, resources of resistance to time
and thought, things not of beauty, for some un-
yielding reason, and quite as little of dignity, but
things of assertion and application in an extra-
ordinary degree, things of a straight cold radiance

47

THE IVORY TOWER

and of an emphasis that was like the stamp of
hard flat feet. Even if she was to be envied it
would be across such gulfs ; as it was indeed
one couldn't so much as envy her the prodigy of
her " figure," which had been at eighteen, as one
had heard, that of a woman of forty and was now
at forty, one saw, that of a girl of eighteen : such
a state of the person wasn't human, to the younger
woman's sombre sense, but might have been that
of some shining humming insect, a thing of the
long-constricted waist, the minimised yet capari-
soned head, the fixed disproportionate eye and
tough transparent wing, gossamer guaranteed.
With all of which, however, she had pushed
through every partition and was in the centre of
her guest's innermost preserve before she had
been heard coming.

" It's too lovely that you should have got him
to do what he ought — that dreadful old man !
But I don't know if you feel how interesting it's
all going to be ; in fact if you know yourself how
wonderful it is that he has already — Mr. Fielder
has, I mean — such a tremendous friend in Cissy."

Rosanna waited, facing her, noting her extra-
ordinary perfections of neatness, of elegance, of
arrangement, of which it couldn't be said whether
they most handed over to you, as on some polished
salver, the clear truth of her essential commonness
or transposed it into an element that could please,
that could even fascinate, as a supreme attestation

48

THE IVORY TOWER

of care. " Take her as an advertisement of all the
latest knowledges of how to ' treat ' every inch
of the human surface and where to ' get ' every
scrap of the personal envelope, so far as she is
enveloped, and she does achieve an effect sublime
in itself and thereby absolute in a wavering world "
—with so much even as that was Miss Gaw aware
of helping to fill for her own use the interval before
she spoke. " No/' she said, " I know nothing of
what any of you may suppose yourselves to know."
After which, however, with a sudden inspiration,
a quick shift of thought as through catching an
alarm, " I haven't seen Mr. Fielder for a very long
time, haven't seen him at all yet here," she added ;
" but though I hoped immensely he would come,
and am awfully glad he has, what I want for him
is to have the very best time he possibly can ; a
much better one than I shall myself at all know
how to help him to."

" Why, aren't you helping him to the greatest
time he can have ever had if you've waked up his
uncle to a sense of decency ? " Gussy demanded
with her brightest promptness. " You needn't
think, Rosanna," she proceeded with a well-nigh
fantastic development of that ease, " you needn't
think you're going to be able to dodge the least
little consequence of your having been so wonder-
ful. He's just going to owe you everything, and
to follow that feeling up ; so I don't see why you
shouldn't want to let him — it would be so mean
D 49

THE IVORY TOWER

of him not to ! — or be deprived of the credit of
so good a turn. When I do things " — Gussy always
had every account of herself ready — " I want to
have them recognised ; I like to make them pay,
without the least shame, in the way of glory gained.
However, it's between yourselves," her delicacy
conceded, " and how can one judge — except just
to envy you such a lovely relation ? All I want is
that you should feel that here we are if you do
want help. He should have here the best there
is, and should have it, don't you think ? before
he tumbles from ignorance into any mistake —
mistakes have such a way of sticking. So don't
be unselfish about him, don't sacrifice him to the
fear of using your advantage : what are such
advantages as you enjoy meant for — all of them,
I mean — but to be used up to the limit ? You'll
see at any rate what Cissy says — she has great
ideas about him. I mean," said Mrs. Bradham
with a qualification in which the expression of
Rosanna's still gaze suddenly seemed reflected,
" I mean that it's so interesting she should have
all the clues."

Rosanna still gazed ; she might even after a
little have struck a watcher as held in spite of
herself by some heavy spell. It was an old sense
— she had already often had it : when once Gussy
had got her head up, got away and away as
Davey called it, she might appear to do what
she would with her victim ; appear, that is, to

5°

THE IVORY TOWER

Gussy herself — the appearance never corresponded
for Miss Gaw to an admission of her own.
Behind the appearance, at all events, things on
one side and the other piled themselves up,
and Rosanna certainly knew what they were
on her side. Nevertheless it was as a vocal
note too faintly quavered through some loud
orchestral sound that she heard herself echo :

" The clues ? "

" Why, it's so funny there should be such a lot
—and all gathered about here ! " To this attesta-
tion of how everything in the world, for that matter,
was gathered right there Rosanna felt herself
superficially yield ; and even before she knew
what was coming — for something clearly was —
she was strangely conscious of a choice somehow
involved in her attitude and dependent on her
mind, and this too as at almost the acutest moment
of her life. What it came to, with the presentiment
of forces at play such as she had really never yet
had to count with, was the question, all for herself,
of whether she should be patently lying in the
profession of a readiness to hand the subject of
her interest over unreservedly to all waiting, all
so remarkably gathering contacts and chances,
or whether the act wouldn't partake of the very
finest strain of her past sincerity. She was to
remember the moment later on as if she had really
by her definition, by her selection, " behaved "
—fairly feeling the breath of her young man's

THE IVORY TOWER

experience on her cheek before knowing with the
least particularity what it would most be, and
deciding then and there to swallow down every
fear of any cost of anything to herself. She felt
extraordinarily in the presence of symptoms,
symptoms of life, of death, of danger, of delight,
of what did she know ? But this it was exactly
that cast derision, by contrast, on such poor
obscurities as her feelings, and settled it for her
that when she had professed a few minutes back
that she hoped they would all, for his possible
pleasure in it, catch him up and, so far as they
might, make him theirs, she wasn't to have spoken
with false frankness. Queer enough at the same
time, and a wondrous sign of her state of sensi-
bility, that she should see symptoms glimmer
from so very far off. What was this one that was
already in the air before Mrs. Bradham had so
much as answered her question ?

Well, the next moment at any rate she knew,
and more extraordinary then than anything was the
spread of her apprehension, off somehow to the
incalculable, under Gussy's mention of a name.
What did this show most of all, however, but how
little the intensity of her private association with
the name had even yet died out, or at least how
vividly it could revive in a connection by which
everything in her was quickened ? " Haughty "
Vint, just lately conversed with by Cissy in New
York, it appeared, and now coming on to the

52

THE IVORY TOWER

Bradhams from one day to another, had fed the
girl with information, it also, and more wonder-
fully, transpired — information about Gray's young
past, all surprisingly founded on close contacts,
the most interesting, between the pair, as well as
the least suspected ever by Rosanna : to such an
effect that the transmitted trickle of it had after a
moment swelled from Gussy's lips into a stream
by which our friend's consciousness was flooded.
" Clues " these connections might well be called
when every touch could now set up a vibration.
It hummed away at once like a pressed button—
if she had been really and in the least meanly
afraid of complications she might now have sat
staring at one that would do for oddity, for the
oddity of that relation of her own with Cissy's
source of anecdote which could so have come and
gone and yet thrown no light for her on anything
but itself ; little enough, by what she had tried to
make of it at the time, though that might have been.
It had meanwhile scarce revived for her other-
wise, even if reviving now, as we have said, to
intensity, that Horton Vint's invitation to her
some three years before to bestow her hand upon
him in marriage had been attended by impressions
as singular perhaps as had ever marked a like
case in an equal absence of outward show. The
connection with him remaining for her had simply
been that no young man — in the clear American
social air — had probably ever approached a young

53

THE IVORY TOWER

woman on such ground with so utter a lack of
ostensible warrant and had yet at the same time
so saved the situation for himself, or for what he
might have called his dignity, and even hers ; to
the positive point of his having left her with the
mystery, in all the world, that she could still most
pull out from old dim confusions to wonder about,
and wonder all in vain, when she had nothing
better to do. Everything was over between them
save the fact that they hadn't quarrelled, hadn't
indeed so much as discussed ; but here withal
was association, association unquenched — from the
moment a fresh breath, as just now, could blow upon
it. He had had the appearance — it was unmistake-
able — of absolutely believing she might accept him
if he but put it to her lucidly enough and let her
look at him straight enough ; and the extra-
ordinary thing was that, for all her sense of
this at the hour, she hadn't imputed to him a
real fatuity.

It had remained with her that, given certain
other facts, no incident of that order could
well have had so little to confess by any of its
aspects to the taint of vulgarity. She had
seen it, she believed, as he meant it, meant
it with entire conviction : he had intended a
tribute, of a high order, to her intelligence,
which he had counted on, or at least faced with
the opportunity, to recognise him as a greater
value, taken all round, appraised by the whole

54

THE IVORY TOWER

suitability, than she was likely ever again to find
offered. He was of course to take or to leave,
and she saw him stand there in that light as he
had then stood, not pleading, not pressing, not
pretending to anything but the wish and the
capacity to serve, only holding out her chance,
appealing to her judgment, inviting her inspection,
meeting it without either a shade of ambiguity or,
so far as she could see, any vanity beyond the facts.
It had all been wonderful enough, and not least
so that, although absolutely untouched and un-
tempted, perfectly lucid on her own side and
perfectly inaccessible, she had in a manner admired
him, in a manner almost enjoyed him, in the act
of denying him hope. Extraordinary in especial
had it been that he was probably right, right about
his value, right about his rectitude, of conscious
intention at least, right even as to his general
calculation of effect, an effect probably producible
on most women ; right finally in judging that
should he strike at all this would be the one way.
It was only less extraordinary that no faintest
shade of regret, no lightest play of rueful imagina-
tion, no subordinate stir of pity or wonder, had
attended her memory of having left him to the
mere cold comfort of reflection. It was his truth
that had fallen short, not his error ; the soundness,
as it were, of his claim — so far as his fine intelligence,
matching her own, that is, could make it sound-
had had nothing to do with its propriety. She had

55

THE IVORY TOWER

refused him, none the less, without disliking him,
at the same time that she was at no moment after-
wards conscious of having cared whether he had
suffered. She had been too unaware of the question
even to remark that she seemed indifferent ;
though with a vague impression — so far as that
went — that suffering was not in his chords. His
acceptance of his check she could but call inscrut-
ably splendid — inscrutably perhaps because she
couldn't quite feel that it had left nothing between
them. Something there was, something there
had to be, if only the marvel, so to say, of her
present, her permanent, backward vision of the
force with which they had touched and separated.
It stuck to her somehow that they had touched
still more than if they had loved, held each other
still closer than if they had embraced : to such
and so strange a tune had they been briefly intimate.
Would any man ever look at her so for passion as
Mr. Vint had looked for reason ? and should her
own eyes ever again so visit a man's depths and
gaze about in them unashamed to a tune to match
that adventure ? Literally what they had said
was comparatively unimportant — once he had made
his errand clear ; whereby the rest might all have
been but his silent exhibition of his personality,
so to name it, his honour, his assumption, his
situation, his life, and that failure on her own part
to yield an inch which had but the more let him
see how straight these things broke upon her.

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THE IVORY TOWER

For all the straightness, it was true, the fact that
might most have affected, not to say concerned,
her had remained the least expressed. It wasn't
for her now to know what difference it could have
made that he was in relation with Gray Fielder ;
incontestably, however, their relation, or their
missing of one, hers and Haughty's, flushed anew
in the sudden light.

" Oh I'm so glad he has good friends here then
— with such a clever one as Mr. Vint we can certainly
be easy about him." So much Rosanna heard
herself at last say, and it would doubtless have
quite served for assent to Gussy's revelation without
the further support given her by the simultaneous
convergence upon them of various members of the
party, who exactly struck our young woman as
having guessed, by the sight of hostess and momen-
tous guest withdrawn together, that the topic of
the moment was there to be plucked from their
hands. Rosanna was now on her feet — she couldn't
sit longer and just take things ; and she was to
ask herself afterwards with what cold stare of
denial she mightn't have appeared quite unprece-
dentedly to face the inquiring rout under the sense
that now certainly, if she didn't take care, she
should have nothing left of her own. It wasn't
that they weren't, all laughter and shimmer, all
senseless sound and expensive futility, the easiest
people in the world to share with, and several the
very prettiest and pleasantest, of the vaguest

57

I THE IVORY TOWER

insistence after all, the most absurdly small aware-
ness of what they were eager about ; but that of
the three or four things then taking place at once
the brush across her heart of Gray's possible im-
mediate question, " Have you brought me over

then to live with these ? " had most in common

with alarm. It positively helped her indeed
withal that she found herself, the next thing,
greeting with more sincerity of expression than
she had, by her consciousness, yet used Mrs. Brad-
ham's final leap to action in the form of " I want
him to dinner of course right off ! " She said it
with the big brave laugh that represented her
main mercy for the general public view of her
native eagerness, an eagerness appraised, not to
say proclaimed, by herself as a passion for the
service of society, and in connection with which
it was mostly agreed that she never so drove her
flock before her as when paying this theoretic
tribute to grace of manner. Before Rosanna
could ejaculate, moved though she was to do
so, the question had been taken up by the
extremely pretty person who was known to her
friends, and known even to Rosanna, as Minnie
Undle and who at once put in a plea for Mr.
Fielder's presence that evening, her own having
been secured for it. Before such a rate of pro-
cedure as this evocation implied even Gussy
appeared to recoil, but with a prompt proviso in
favour of the gentleman's figuring rather on the

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THE IVORY TOWER

morrow, when Mrs. Undle, since she seemed so
impatient, might again be of the party. Mrs.
Undle agreed on the spot, though by this time
Rosanna's challenge had ceased to hang fire. " But
do you really consider that you know him so much
as that ? " — she let Gussy have it straight, even
if at the disadvantage that there were now as ever
plenty of people to react, to the last hilarity, at
the idea that acquaintance enjoyed on either side
was needfully imputable to these participations.
" That's just why — if we don't know him ! " Mrs.
Undle further contributed ; while Gussy declined
recognition of the relevance of any word of Miss
Gaw's. She declined it indeed in her own way,
by a yet stiffer illustration of her general resilience ;
an "Of course I mean, dear, that I look to you to
bring him ! " expressing sufficiently her system.

" Then you really expect him when his uncle'5

dying ? " sprang in all honesty from Rosanna's

lips ; to be taken up on the instant, however, by
a voice that was not Gussy's and that rang clear
before Gussy could speak.

" There can't be the least question of it — even
if we're dying ourselves, or even if I am at least ! "
was what Rosanna heard ; with Cissy Foy, of a
sudden supremely exhibited, giving the case at
once all happy sense, all bright quick harmony
with their general immediate interest. She pressed
to Rosanna straight, as if nothing as yet had had
time to pass between them — which very little

59

THE IVORY TOWER

in fact had ; with the result for our young woman
of feeling helped, by the lightest of turns, not to
be awkward herself, or really, what came to the
same thing, not to be anything herself. It was a
fine perception she had had before — of how Cissy
could on occasion " do " for one, and this, all
extraordinarily and in a sort of double sense, by
quenching one in her light at the very moment she
offered it for guidance. She quenched Gussy, she
was the single person who could, Gussy almost
gruntingly consenting ; she quenched Minnie Undle,
she cheapened every other presence, scattering
lovely looks, multiplying happy touches, grasping
Rosanna for possession, yet at the same time, as
with her free hand, waving away every other con-
nection : so that a minute or two later — for it
scarce seemed more — the pair were isolated, still
on the verandah somewhere, but intensely con-
fronted and talking at ease, or in a way that had
to pass for ease, with its not mattering at all
whether their companions, dazzled and wafted
off, had dispersed and ceased to be, or whether they
themselves had simply been floated to where they
wished on the great surge of the girl's grace. The
girl's grace was, after its manner, such a force
that Miss Gaw had had repeatedly, on past occasions,
to doubt even while she recognised — for could a
young creature you weren't quite sure of use a
weapon of such an edge only for good ? The young
creature seemed at any rate now as never yet to

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THE IVORY TOWER

give out its play for a thing to be counted on and
trusted ; and with Gussy Bradham herself shown
just there behind them as letting it take every-
thing straight out of her hands, nobody else at all
daring to touch, what were you to do but verily
feel distinguished by its so wrapping you about?
The only sharpness in what had happened was
that with Cissy's act of presence Mrs. Bradham
had exercised her great function of social appraiser
by staring and then, as under conclusions drawn
from it, giving way. One might have found it
redeemingly soft in her that before this particular
suggestion she could melt, or that in other words
Cissy appeared the single fact in all the world
about which she had anything to call imagination.
She imagined her, she imagined her now, and as
dealing somehow with their massive friend ; which
consciousness, on the latter's part, it must be said,
played for the moment through everything else.

Not indeed that there wasn't plenty for the
girl to fill the fancy with ; since nothing could
have been purer than the stream that she poured
into Rosanna's as from an upturned crystal urn
while she repeated over, holding her by the two
hands, gazing at her in admiration : "I can see
how you care for him — I can see, I can see ! "
And she felt indeed, our young woman, how the
cover was by this light hand whisked off her secret
—Cissy made it somehow a secret in the act of
laying it bare ; and that she blushed for the felt

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THE IVORY TOWER

exposure as even Gussy had failed to make her.
Seeing which her companion but tilted the further
vessel of confidence. " It's too funny, it's too
wonderful that I too should know something.
But I do, and I'll tell you how — not now, for I
haven't time, but as soon as ever I can ; which
will make you see. So what you must do for all
you're worth," said Cissy, "is to care now more
than ever. You must keep him from us, because
we're not good enough and you are ; you must
act in the sense of what you feel, and must feel
exactly as you've a right to — for, as I say, I know,
I know ! "

It was impossible, Rosanna seemed to see, that
a generous young thing should shine out in more
beauty ; so that what in the world might one ever
keep from her ? Surpassingly strange the plea
thus radiant on the very brow of the danger !
' You mean you know Mr. Fielder's history ?
from your having met somebody ? "

" Oh that of course, yes ; Gussy, whom I've
told of my having met Mr. Northover, will have
told you. That's curious and charming," Cissy
went on, " and I want awfully we should talk of
it. But it isn't what I mean by what I know —
and what you don't, my dear thing ! "

Rosanna couldn't have told why, but she had
begun to tremble, and also to try not to show it.
" What I don't know — about Gray Fielder ? Why,
of course there's plenty ! " she smiled.

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Cissy still held her hands ; but Cissy now was
grave. " No, there isn't plenty — save so far as
what I mean is enough. And I haven't told it to
Gussy. It's too good for her/' the girl added.
" It's too good for any one but you."

Rosanna just waited, feeling herself perhaps
grimace. " What, Cissy, are you talking about ? "

" About what I heard from Mr. Northover when
we met him, when we saw so much of him, three
years ago at Ragatz, where we had gone for Mamma
and where we went through the cure with him.
He and I struck up a friendship and he often spoke
to me of his stepson — who wasn't there with him,
was at that time off somewhere in the mountains
or in Italy, I forget, but to whom I could see he
was devoted. He and I hit it off beautifully to-
gether— he seemed to me awfully charming and to
like to tell me things. So what I allude to is some-
thing he said to me."

" About me ? " Rosanna gasped.

" Yes — I see now it was about you. But it's
only to-day that I've guessed that. Otherwise,

otherwise ! " And as if under the weight of

her great disclosure Cissy faltered.

But she had now indeed made her friend desire
it. " You mean that otherwise you'd have told
me before ? "

" Yes indeed — and it's such a miracle I didn't.
It's such a miracle," said Cissy, " that the person
should all this time have been you — or you have

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been the person. Of course I had no idea that all
this — everything that has taken place now, by
what I understand — was going so extraordinarily
to happen. You see he never named Mr. Better-
man, or in fact, I think," the girl explained, " told
me anything about him. And he didn't name,
either, Gray's friend — so that in spite of the im-
pression made on me you've never till to-day been
identified."

Immense, as she went, Rosanna felt, the number
of things she gave her thus together to think
about. What was coming she clearly needn't fear
—might indeed, deep within, happily hold her
breath for ; but the very interest somehow made
her rest an instant, as for refinement of suspense,
on the minor surprises. ' The impression then
has been so great that you call him ' Gray ' ? "

The girl at this ceased holding hands ; she folded
her arms back together across her slim young
person — the frequent habit of it in her was of the
prettiest " quaint " effect ; she laughed as if sub-
mitting to some just correction of a freedom.
" Oh, but my dear, he did, the delightful man —
and isn't it borne in upon me that you do ? Of
course the impression was great — and if Mr. North-
over and I had met younger I don't know," her
laugh said, " what mightn't have happened. No,
I never shall have had a greater, a more intelligent
admirer ! As it was we remained true, secretly
true, for fond memory, to the end : at least I did,

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though ever so secretly — you see I speak of it only
now — and I want to believe so in his impression.
But how I torment you ! " she suddenly said in
another tone.

Rosanna, nursing her patience, had a sad slow
headshake. " I don't understand."

" Of course you don't — and yet it's too beautiful.
It was about Gray — once when we talked of him,
as I've told you we repeatedly did. It was that
he never would look at anyone else."

Our friend could but appear at least to cast about.
" Anyone else than whom ? "

"Why than you," Cissy smiled. "The girl he
had loved in boyhood. The American girl who,
years before, in Dresden, had done for him some-
thing he could never forget."

" And what had she done ? " stared Rosanna.

" Oh he didn't tell me that \ But if you don't
take great care, as I say," Cissy went on, " perhaps
he may — I mean Mr. Fielder himself may when
we close round him in the way that, in your place,
as I assure you, I would certainly do everything
to prevent."

Rosanna looked about as with a sudden sense
of weakness, the effect of overstrain ; it was absurd,
but these last minutes might almost, with their
queer action, and as to the ground they covered,
have been as many formidable days. A fine verandah
settee again close at hand offered her support, and
she dropped upon it, as for large retrieval of
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THE IVORY TOWER

menaced ease, with a need she herself alone could
measure. The need was to recover some sense of
perspective, to be able to place her young friend's
somehow portentous assault off in such conditions,
if only of mere space and time, as would make for
some greater convenience of relation with it. It
did at once help her — and really even for the tone
in which she smiled across : "So you're sure ? "

Cissy hovered, shining, shifting, yet accepting
the perspective as it were — when in the world
had she to fear any ? — and positively painted there
in bright contradiction, her very grace again, after
the odd fashion in which it sometimes worked,
seeming to deny her sincerity, and her very candour
seeming to deny her gravity. " Sure of what ?
Sure I'm right about you ? "

Rosanna took a minute to say — so many things
worked in her ; yet when one of these came upper-
most, pushing certain of the others back, she found
for putting it forward a tone grateful to her own
ear. This tone represented on her part too a
substitute for sincerity, but that was exactly what
she wanted. " I don't care a fig for any anecdote
about myself — which moreover it would be very
difficult for you to have right. What I ask you
if you're certain of is your being really not fit for
him. Are you absolutely," said Miss Gaw, " as
bad as that ? "

The girl, placed before her, looked at her now,
with raised hands folded together, as if she had

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been some seated idol, a great Buddha perched

up on a shrine. " Oh Rosanna, Rosanna ! "

she admiringly, piously breathed.

But it was not such treatment that could keep
Miss Gaw from completing her chosen sense. " I
should be extremely sorry — so far as I claim any
influence on him — to interfere against his getting
over here whatever impressions he may ; interfere
by his taking you for more important, in any
way, than seems really called for/'

" Taking me ? " Cissy smiled.
' Taking any of you — the people, in general
and in particular, who haunt this house. We
mustn't be afraid for him of his having the interest,
or even the mere amusement, of learning all that's
to be learnt about us."

" Oh Rosanna, Rosanna " — the girl kept it up —
" how you adore him ; and how you make me there-
fore, wretch that I am, fiendishly want to see him ! "

But it might quite have glanced now from our
friend's idol surface. "You're the best of us, no
doubt — very much ; and I immensely hope you'll
like him, since you've been so extraordinarily
prepared. It's to be supposed too that he'll have
some sense of his own."

Cissy continued rapt. " Oh but you're deep
— deep deep deep ! "

It came out as another presence again, that of
Davey Bradham, who had the air of rather rest-
lessly looking for her, emerged from one of the

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long windows of the house, just at hand, to meet
Rosanna's eyes. She found herself glad to have
him back, as if further to inform him. Wasn't it
after all rather he that was the best of them and
by no means Cissy ? Her face might at any rate
have conveyed as much while she reported of that
young lady. " She thinks me so deep."

It made the girl, who had not seen him, turn
round ; but with an immediate equal confidence.
" And she thinks me, Davey, so good ! "

Davey's eyes were only on Cissy, but Rosanna
seemed to feel them on herself. " How you must
have got mixed ! " he exclaimed. " But your
father has come for you," he then said to Rosanna,
who had got up.

" Father has walked it ? " — she was amazed.

" No, he's there in a hack to take you home —
and too excited to come in."

Rosanna's surprise but grew. " Has anything
happened ? "

" Wonders — I asked them. Mr. Betterman's
sitting right up."

" Really improving— - ? " Then her mystifi-
cation spread. " ' Them,' you say ? "

" Why his nurse, as I at least suppose her,"
said Davey, " is with him — apparently to give you
the expert opinion."

" Of the fiend's recuperating ? " Cissy cried with
a wail. And then before her friend's bewilderment,
" How dreadfully horrid ! " she added.

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" Whose nurse, please ? " Rosanna asked of
Davey.

" Why, hasn't he got a nurse ? " Davey him-
self, as always, but desired lucidity. " She's doing
her duty by him all the same ! "

On which Cissy's young wit at once apprehended.
" It's one of Mr. Betterman's taking a joy-ride in
honour of his recovery ! Did you ever hear any-
thing so cool ? "

She had appealed to her friends alike, but Rosanna,
under the force of her suggestion, was already in
advance. " Then father himself must be ill ! "
Miss Gaw had declared, moving rapidly to the
quarter in which he so incongruously waited
and leaving Davey to point a rapid moral for Cissy's
benefit while this couple followed.

"If he is so upset that he hasn't been trusted
alone I'll be hanged if I don't just see it ! "

But the marvel was the way in which after an
instant Cissy saw it too. " You mean because he
can't stand Mr. Betterman's perhaps not dying ? "

" Yes, dear ingenuous child — he has wanted so
to see him out."

"Well then, isn't it what we're all wanting?"

" Most undoubtedly, pure pearl of penetration ! "
Davey returned as they went. " His pick-up will
be a sell," he ruefully added ; " even though it
mayn't quite kill any one of us but Mr. Gaw ! "

69

BOOK SECOND

GRAHAM'S view of his case and of all his proprieties,
from the moment of his arrival, was that he should
hold himself without reserve at his uncle's im-
mediate disposition, and even such talk as seemed
indicated, during the forenoon, with Doctor Hatch
and Miss Mumby, the nurse then in charge, did
little to lighten for him the immense prescription
of delicacy. What he learnt was far from discon-
certing ; the patient, aware of his presence, had
shown for soothed, not for agitated ; the drop of
the tension of waiting had had the benign effect ;
he had repeated over to his attendant that now
" the boy " was there, all would be for the best,
and had asked also with soft iteration if he were
having everything he wanted. The happy assurance
of this right turn of their affair, so far as they had
got, he was now quietly to enjoy : he was to rest
two or three hours, and if possible to sleep, while
Graham, on his side, sought a like remedy — after
the full indulgence in which their meeting would

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take place. The excellent fact for " the boy,"
who was two-and-thirty years of age and who now
quite felt as if during the last few weeks he had
lived through a dozen more, was thus that he was
doing his uncle good and that somehow, to com-
plete that harmony, he might feel the operation
of an equal virtue. At his invitation, at his decision,
the idea of some such wondrous matter as this had
of course presided — for waiting and obliging good,
which one was simply to open one's heart or one's
hand to, had struck him ever as so little of the
common stuff of life that now, at closer range, it
could but figure as still more prodigious. At the
same time there was nothing he dreaded, by his
very nature, more than a fond fatuity, and he had
imposed on himself from the first to proceed at
every step as if without consideration he might
well be made an ass of. It was true that even such
a danger as this presented its interest — the process
to which he should yield would be without precedent
for him, and his imagination, thank heaven, had
curiosity in a large measure for its principle ; he
wouldn't rush into peril, however, and flattered
himself that after all he should not recognise its
symptoms too late.

What he said to himself just now on the spot
was, at any rate, that he should probably have
been more excited if he hadn't been so amused.
To be amused to a high pitch while his nearest
kinsman, apparently nursing, as he had been told,

THE IVORY TOWER

a benevolence, lay dying a few rooms off — let
this impute levity to our young man only till we
understand that his liability to recreation represented
in him a function serious indeed. Everything played
before him, everything his senses embraced ; and
since his landing in New York on the morning
before this the play had been of a delightful violence.
No slightest aspect or briefest moment of it but
had held and, so to say, rewarded him : if he had
come back at last for impressions, for emotions,
for the sake of the rush upon him of the character-
istic, these things he was getting in a measure
beyond his dream. It was still beyond his dream
that what everything merely seen from the window
of his room meant to him during these first hours
should move him first to a smile of such ecstasy,
and then to such an inward consumption of his
smile, as might have made of happiness a substance
you could sweetly put under your tongue. He
recognised — that was the secret, recognised wherever
he looked — and knew that when, from far back,
during his stretch of unbroken absence, he had
still felt, and liked to feel, what air had originally
breathed upon him, these piercing intensities of
salience had really peopled the vision. He had
much less remembered the actual than forecast
the inevitable, and the huge involved necessity
of its all showing as he found it seemed fairly to
shout in his ear. He had brought with him a fine
intention, one of the finest of which he was capable,

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and wasn't it, he put to himself, already working ?
Wasn't he gathering in a perfect bloom of fresh-
ness the fruit of his design rather to welcome the
impression to extravagance, if need be, than to
undervalue it by the breadth of a hair ? Inexpert
he couldn't help being, but too estranged to melt
again at whatever touch might make him, that
he'd be hanged if he couldn't help, since what was
the great thing again but to hold up one's face to
any drizzle of light ?

There it was, the light, in a mist of silver, even
as he took in the testimony of his cool bedimmed
room, where the air was toned by the closing of
the great green shutters. It was ample and elegant,
of an American elegance, which was so unlike any
other, and so still more unlike any lapse of it, ever
met by him, that some of its material terms and
items held him as in rapt contemplation ; what
he had wanted, even to intensity, being that things
should prove different, should positively glare with
opposition — there would be no fun at all were
they only imperfectly like, as that wouldn't in
the least mean character. Their character might
be if it would in their consistently having none
— than which deficiency nothing was more possible ;
but he should have to decline to be charmed by
unsuccessful attempts at sorts of expression he
had elsewhere known more or less happily achieved.
This particular disappointment indeed he was
clearly not in for, since what could at once be more

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interesting than thus to note that the range and
scale kept all their parts together, that each object
or effect disowned connections, as he at least had
all his life felt connections, and that his cherished
hope of the fresh start and the broken link would
have its measure filled to the brim. There was
an American way for a room to be a room, a table
a table, a chair a chair and a book a book — let
alone a picture on a wall a picture, and a cold gush
of water in a bath of a hot morning a promise of
purification ; and of this license all about him,
in fine, he beheld the refreshing riot.

It cast on him for the time a spell ; he moved
about with soft steps and long pauses, staring out
between the slats of the shutters, which he gently
worked by their attachment, and then again living,
with a subtlety of sense that it was a pleasure to
exercise, into the conditions represented by what-
ever more nearly pressed. It was not only that
the process of assimilation, unlike any other he
had yet been engaged in, might stop short, to
disaster, if he so much as breathed too hard ; but
that if he made the sufficient surrender he might
absolutely himself be assimilated — and that was
truly an experience he couldn't but want to have.
The great thing he held on to withal was a decent
delicacy, a dread of appearing even to himself to
take big things for granted. This of itself was
restrictive as to freedoms — it stayed familiarities,
it kept uncertainty cool ; for after all what had

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his uncle done but cause to be conveyed to him
across the sea the bare wish that he should come ?
He had straightway come in consequence, but
on no explanation and for no signified reward ;
he had come simply to avoid a possible ugliness
in his not coming. Generally addicted to such
avoidances, to which it indeed seemed to him that
the quest of beauty was too often reduced, he had
found his reason sufficient until the present hour,
when it was as if all reasons, all of his own at least,
had suddenly abandoned him, to the effect of his
being surrounded only with those of others, of
which he was up to now ignorant, but which somehow
hung about the large still place, somehow stiffened
the vague summer Sunday and twinkled in the
universal cleanness, a real revelation to him of that
possible immunity in things. He might have been
sent for merely to be blown up for the relief of the
old man's mind on the perversity and futility of
his past. There was before him at all events no
gage of anything else, no intimation other than
his having been, materially speaking, preceded
by preparations, to make him throw himself on a
survey of prospects. What was before him at the
least was a " big " experience — even to have come
but to be cursed and dismissed would really be
a bigger thing than yet had befallen him. Not
the form but the fact of the experience accordingly
mattered — so that wasn't it there to a fine intensity
by his standing ever and anon at the closed door

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of his room and feeling that with his ear intent
enough he could catch the pressure on the other
side ?

The pressure was at last unmistakeable, we
note, in the form of Miss Mumby, who, having
gently tapped, appeared there both to remark to
him that he must surely at last want his luncheon
and to affect him afresh and in the supreme degree
as a vessel of the American want of correspondence.
Miss Mumby was ample, genial, familiar and
more radiantly clean than he had ever known
any vessel, to whatever purpose destined ; also
the number of things she took for granted — if it
was a question of that, or perhaps rather the
number of things of which she didn't doubt and
was incapable of doubting, surrounded her together
with a kind of dazzling aura, a special radiance
of disconnection. She wore a beautiful white
dress, and he scarce knew what apparatus of spot-
less apron and cuffs and floating streamers to
match ; yet she could only again report to him
of the impression that had most jumped at him
from the moment of his arrival. He saw in a moment
that any difficulty on his part of beginning with
her at some point in social space, so to say, at
which he had never begun before with any such
person, would count for nothing in face of her own
perfect power to begin. The faculty of beginning
would be in truth Miss Mumby 's very genius, and
in the moment of his apprehension of this he felt

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too — he had in fact already felt it at their first
meeting — how little his pale old postulates as to
persons being " such " might henceforth claim
to serve him. What person met by him during
his thirty hours in American air was " such "
again as any other partaker of contact had appeared
or proved, no matter where, before his entering it ?
What person had not at once so struck him in the
light of violent repudiation of type, as he might
save for his sensibility have imputed type, that
nothing else in the case seemed predicable ? He
might have seen Miss Mumby, he was presently
to recognise, in the light of a youngish mother
perhaps, a sister, a cousin, a friend, even a possible
bride, for these were aspects independent of type
and boundlessly free of range ; but a " trained
nurse " was a trained nurse, and that was a category
of the most evolved — in spite of which what
category in all the world could have lifted its head
in Miss Mumby 's aura ?

Still, she might have been a pleasant cousin,
a first cousin, the very first a man had ever had
and not in any degree " removed/' while she thus
proclaimed the cheerful ease of everything and
everyone, her own above all, and made him yield
on the spot to her lightest intimation. He couldn't
possibly have held off from her in any way, and
if this was in part because he always collapsed
at a touch before nurses, it was at the same time
not at all the nurse in her that now so affected

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THE IVORY TOWER

him, but the incalculable other force, of which
he had had no experience and which was apparently
that of the familiar in tone and manner. He had
known, of a truth, familiarity greater — much
greater, but only with greater occasions and sup-
ports for it ; whereas on Miss Mumby's part it
seemed independent of any or of every motive.
He could scarce have said in fine, as he followed
her to their repast, at which he foresaw in an instant
that they were both to sit down, whether it more
alarmed or just more coolingly enveloped him ;
his slight first bewilderment at any rate had
dropped — he had already forgotten the moment
wasted two or three hours before in wondering,
with his sense of having known Nurses who gloried
in their title, how his dear second father, for instance,
would in his final extremity have liked the minis-
trations of a Miss. By those he himself presently
enjoyed in such different conditions, that is from
across the table, bare and polished and ever so
delicately charged, of the big dusky, yet just a
little breezy dining-room, by those in short under
which every association he had ever had with
anything crashed down to pile itself as so much
more tinklingly shivered glass at Miss Mumby's
feet, that sort of question was left far behind —
and doubtless would have been so even if the
appeal of the particular refection served to them
had alone had the case in hand. " I'm going to
make you like our food, so you might as well begin

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THE IVORY TOWER

at once," his companion had announced ; and he
felt it on the spot as scarce less than delicious
that this element too should play, and with such
fineness, into that harmony of the amusingly
exotic which was, under his benediction, working
its will on him. " Oh yes," she rejoined in answer
to his exhibition of the degree in which what was
before him did stir again to sweetness a chord of
memory, " oh yes, food's a great tie, it's like
language — you can always understand your own,
whereas in Europe I had to learn about six others."
Miss Mumby had been to Europe, and he saw
soon enough how there was nowhere one could say
she hadn't gone and nothing one could say she
hadn't done — one's perception could bear only
on what she hadn't become ; so that, as he thus
perceived, though she might have affected Europe
even as she was now affecting him, she was a
pure negation of its having affected herself,
unless perhaps by adding to her power to make
him feel how little he could impose on her. She
knew all about his references while he only
missed hers, and that gave her a tremendous
advantage — or would have done so hadn't she
been too much his cousin to take it. He at any
rate recognised in a moment that the so many
things she had had to learn to understand over
there were not forms of speech but alimentary
systems — as to which view he quite agreed with
her that the element of the native was equally

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THE IVORY TOWER

rooted in both supports of life. This gave her
of course her opportunity of remarking that she
had indeed made for the assimilation of " his "
cookery — whichever of the varieties his had most
been — scarce less an effort than she must confess
now to making for that of his terms of utterance ;
where she had at once again the triumph that he
was nowhere, by his own reasoning, if he pretended
to an affinity with the nice things they were now
eating and yet stood off from the other ground.
" Oh I understand you, which appears to be so
much more than you do me ! " he laughed ; " but
am I really committed to everything because I'm
committed, in the degree you see me, oh yes, to
waffles and maple syrup, followed, and on such a
scale, by melons and ice-cream ? You see in the
one case I have but to take in, and in the other
have to give out : so can't I have, in a quiet way
the American palate without emitting the American
sounds ? " Thus was he on the straightest flattest
level with Miss Mumby — it stretched, to his im-
agination, without a break, a rise or a fall, ^ perte
de vue ; and thus was it already attested that the
Miss Mumbys (for it was evident there would be
thousands of them) were in society, or were, at
any rate, not out of it, society thereby becoming
clearly colossal. What was it, moreover, but the
best society — as who should say anywhere — when
his companion made the bright point that if any-
thing had to do with sounds the palate did ?

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returning with it also to the one already made, her
due warning that she wasn't going to have him
not like everything. " But I do, I do, I do," he
declared, with his mouth full of a seasoned and
sweetened, a soft, substantial coldness and richness
that were at once the revelation of a world and
the consecration of a fate ; "I revel in everything,
I already wallow, behold : I move as in a dream,
I assure you, and I only fear to wake up."

" Well, I don't know as I want you to wallow,
and I certainly don't want you to fear — though
you'll wake up soon enough, I guess," his enter-
tainer continued, " whatever you do. You'll
wake up to some of our realities, and — well, we
won't want anything better for you : will we,
Doctor ? " Miss Mumby freely proceeded on their
being joined for a moment by the friendly physician
who had greeted our young man, on his uncle's
behalf, at his hour of arrival, and who, having
been again for awhile with their interesting host,
had left the second nurse in charge and was about
to be off to other cares. "I'm saying to Mr. Fielder
that he's got to wake up to some pretty big things,"
she explained to Doctor Hatch, whom it struck
Gray she addressed rather as he had heard doctors
address nurses than nurses doctors ; a fact con-
tributing offhand to his awareness, already definite,
that everyone addressed everyone as he had no-
where yet heard the address perpetrated, and that
so, evidently, there were questions connected with
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it that must yet wait over. It was pertinently
to be felt furthermore that Doctor Hatch's own
freedom, which also had quite its own rare freshness
of note, shared in the general property of the whole
appeal to him, the appeal of the very form of the
great sideboard, the very " school," though yet
unrecognised by him, of the pictures hung about,
the very look and dress, the apparently odd identity,
of the selected and arrayed volumes in a bookcase
charged with ornament and occupying the place
of highest dignity in the room, to take his situation
for guaranteed as it was surely not common for
earthly situations to be. This he could feel, how-
ever, without knowing, to any great purpose,
what it really meant ; and he was afterwards
even scarce to know what had further taken place,
under Doctor Hatch's blessing, before he passed
out of the house to the verandah and the grounds,
as their limitations of reach didn't prevent their
being called, and gave himself up to inquiries now
permittedly direct.

Doctor Hatch's message or momentary act of
quaint bright presence came to him thus, on the
verandah, while shining expanses opened, as an
invitation to some extraordinary confidence, some
flight of optimism without a precedent, as a positive
hint in fine that it depended on himself alone to
step straight into the chariot of the sun, which
on his mere nod would conveniently descend
there to the edge of the piazza, and whirl away

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for increase of acquaintance with the time, as it
was obviously going to be, of his life. This was
but his reading indeed of the funny terms in
which the delightful man put it to him that he
seemed by his happy advent to have brought on
for his uncle a prospect, a rise of pitch, not dis-
similar from that sort of vision ; by so high a tide
of ease had the sick room above been flooded,
and such a lot of good would clearly await the
patient from seeing him after a little and at the
perfect proper moment. It was to be that of Mr.
Betterman's competent choice : he lay there as
just for the foretaste of it, which was wholly tran-
quillising, and could be trusted — what else did doctor
and nurse engage for ? — to know the psychological
hour on its striking and then, to complete felicity,
have his visitor introduced. His present mere
assurance of the visitor was in short so agreeable
to him, and by the same token to Doctor Hatch
himself — which was above all what the latter
had conveyed — that the implication of the agreeable
to Graham in return might fairly have been some
imponderable yet ever so sensible tissue, voluminous
interwoven gold and silver, flung as a mantle over
his shoulders while he went. Gray had never felt
around him any like envelope whatever ; so that
on his looking forth at all the candid clearness —
which struck him too, ever so amusingly, as even
more candid when occasionally and aggressively,
that is residentiary, obstructed than when not —

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what he inwardly and fantastically compared it
to was some presented quarto page, vast and fair,
ever so distinctly printed and ever so unexpectedly
vignetted, of a volume of which the leaves would
be turned for him one by one and with no more
trouble on his own part than when a friendly service
beside him at the piano, where he so often sat,
relieved him, from sheet to sheet, of touching his
score.

Wasn't he thus now again " playing," as it had
been a lifelong resource to him to play in that other
posture ? — a question promoted by the way the
composition suddenly broke into the vividest
illustrational figure, that of a little man encountered
on one of his turns of the verandah and who,
affecting him at first as a small waiting and watch-
ing, an almost crouching gnome, the neat domestic
goblin of some old Germanic, some harmonised,
familiarised legend, sat and stared at him from
the depths of an arrested rocking-chair after a
fashion nothing up to then had led him to pre-
conceive. This was a different note from any yet,
a queer, sharp, hard particle in all the softness ;
and it was sensible too, oddly enough, that the
small force of their concussion but grew with its
coming over him the next moment that he simply
had before him Rosanna Gaw's prodigious parent.
Of course it was Mr. Gaw, whom he had never
seen, and of whom Rosanna in the old time had
so little talked ; her mother alone had talked

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of him in those days, and to his own mother only
— with whom Gray had indeed himself afterwards
talked not a little ; but the intensity of the certi-
tude came not so much by any plain as by quite
the most roundabout presumption, the fact of his
always having felt that she required some strange
accounting for, and that here was the requirement
met by just the ripest revelation. She had been
involved in something, produced by something,
intimately pressing upon her and yet as different
as possible from herself ; and here was the con-
centrated difference — which showed him too, with
each lapsing second, its quality of pressure. Abel
Gaw struck him in this light as very finely blanched,
as somehow squeezed together by the operation
of an inward energy or necessity, and as animated
at the same time by the conviction that, should
he sit there long enough and still enough, the young
man from Europe, known to be on the premises,
might finally reward his curiosity. Mr. Gaw was
curiosity embodied — Gray was by the end of the
minute entirely assured of that; it in fact quite
seemed to him that he had never yet in all his life
caught the prying passion so shamelessly in the act.
Shamelessly, he was afterwards to remember having
explained to himself, because his sense of the reach
of the sharp eyes in the small white face, and of
their not giving way for a moment before his own,
suggested to him, even if he could scarce have
said why to that extent, the act of listening at

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the door, at the very keyhole, of a room, combined
with the attempt to make it good under sudden
detection.

So it was, at any rate, that our speculative friend,
the impression of the next turn of the case aiding,
figured the extension, without forms, without the
shade of a form, of their unmitigated mutual glare.
The initiation of this exchange by the little old
gentleman in the chair, who gave for so long no
sign of moving or speaking, couldn't but practically
determine in Graham's own face some resistance
to the purpose exhibited and for which it was clear
no apology impended. By the time he had recog-
nised that his presence was in question for Mr.
Gaw with such an intensity as it had never other-
wise, he felt, had the benefit of, however briefly,
save under some offered gage or bribe, he had also
made out that no " form " would survive for twenty
seconds in any close relation with the personage,
and that if ever he had himself known curiosity
as to what might happen when manners were
consistently enough ignored it was a point on which
he should at once be enlightened. His fellow- visitor,
of whose being there Doctor Hatch and Miss Mumby
were presumably unaware, continued to ignore
everything but the opportunity he enjoyed and the
certainty that Graham would contribute to it —
which certainty made in fact his profit. The
profit, that is, couldn't possibly fail unless Gray
should turn his back and walk off ; which was

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of course possible, but would then saddle Gray
himself with the repudiation of forms : so that—
yes, infallibly — in proportion as the young man
had to be commonly civil would Mr. Gaw's perhaps
unholy satisfaction of it be able to prevail. The
young man had taken it home that he couldn't
simply stare long enough for successful defence
by the time that, presently moving nearer, he
uttered his adversary's name with no intimation
of a doubt. Mr Gaw failed, Gray was afterwards
to inform Rosanna, " to so much as take this up " ;
he was left with everything on his hands but the
character of his identity, the indications of his
face, the betrayals he should so much less succeed
in suppressing than his adversary would succeed
in reading them. The figure presented hadn't
stirred from his posture otherwise than by a motion
of eye just perceptible as Graham moved ; it was
drinking him in, our hero felt, and by this treat-
ment of the full cup, continuously applied to the
lips, stillness was of course imposed. It didn't
again so much as recognise, by any sign given,
Graham's remark that an acquaintance with Miss
Gaw from of old involved naturally their acquaint-
ance : there was no question of Miss Gaw, her
friend found himself after another minute divining,
as there was none of objects or appearances im-
mediately there about them ; the question was
of something a thousand times more relevant and
present, of something the interloper's silence, far

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more than breathed words could have done,
represented the fond hope of mastering.

Graham thus held already, by the old man's
conviction, a secret of high value, yet which, with
the occasion stretched a little, would practically
be at his service — so much as that at least, with
the passage of another moment, he had concluded
to ; and all the while, in the absurdest way, without
his guessing, without his at all measuring, his secret
himself. Mr. Gaw fairly made him want to — want,
that is, as a preliminary or a stopgap, to guess
what it had best, most desirably and most effectively,
become ; for shouldn't he positively like to have
something of the sort in order just to disoblige
this gentleman ? Strange enough how it came to
him at once as a result of the father's refusal of
attention to any connection he might have glanced
at with the daughter, strange enough how it came
to him, under the first flush of heat he had known
since his arrival, that two could play at such a
game and that if Rosanna's interests were to be
so slighted her relative himself should miss even
the minimum of application as one of them. " He
must have wanted to know, he must have wanted

to know ! " this young woman was on a later

day to have begun to explain ; without going on,
however, since by that time Gray had rather made
out, the still greater rush of his impressions help-
ing, the truth of Mr. Gaw's desire. It bore, that
appetite, upon a single point and, daughter or no

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daughter, on nothing else in the world — the
question of what Gray's " interest," in the light
of his uncle's intentions, might size up to ; those
intentions having, to the Gaw imagination, been
of course apprehensible on the spot, and within
the few hours that had lapsed, by a nephew even
of but rudimentary mind. At the present hour
meanwhile, short of the miracle which our friend's
counter-scrutiny alone could have brought about,
there worked for this young intelligence, and with
no small sharpness, the fact itself of such a re-
vealed relation to the ebb of their host's life—
upon which was thrust the appearance of its being,
watch in hand, all impatiently, or in other words
all offensively, timed. The very air at this instant
tasted to Gray, quite as if something under his
tongue had suddenly turned from the sweet to
the appreciably sour, of an assumption diffused
through it in respect to the rudiments of mind.
He was afterwards to date the breaking-in upon
him of the general measure of the smallest vision
of business a young man might self-respectingly
confess to from Mr. Gaw's extraordinary tacit
" Oh come, you can't fool me : don't I know
you know what I want to know — don't I know
what it must mean for you to have been here since
six o'clock this morning with nothing whatever
else to do than just to take it in ? "

That was it — Gray was to have taken in the
more or less definite value involved for him in

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his uncle's supposedly near extinction, and was
to be capable, if not of expressing it on the spot
in the only terms in which a value of any sort
could exist for this worthy, yet still at least of
liability to such a betrayal as would yield him
something to conclude upon. It was only after-
wards, once more, that our young man was to
master the logic of the conclusive as it prevailed
for Mr. Gaw ; what concerned his curiosity was
to settle whether or no they were in presence
together of a really big fact — distinguishing as
the Gaw mind did among such dimensions and
addressed as it essentially was to a special ques-
tion— a question as yet unrecognised by Gray. He
was subsequently to have his friend's word to
go upon — when, in the extraordinary light of
Rosanna's explication, he read clear what he had
been able on the verandah but half to glimmer
out : the queer truth of Mr. Gaw's hunger to learn
to what extent he had anciently, to what degree he
had irremediably, ruined his whilom associate. He
didn't know — so strange was it, at the time and
since, that, thanks to the way Mr. Betterman
had himself fixed things, he couldn't be sure ;
but what he wanted, and what he hung about so
displeasingly to sniff up the least stray sign of,
was a confirmation of his belief that Doctor Hatch's
and Miss Mumby's patient had never really re-
covered from the wound of years before. They
were nursing him now for another complaint

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altogether, this one admittedly such as must,
with but the scantest further reprieve, dispose
of him ; whereas doubts were deep, as Mr. Gaw
at least entertained them, as to whether the damage
he supposed his own just resentment to have
inflicted when propriety and opportunity com-
bined to inspire him was amenable even to nursing
the most expert or to medication the most subtle.
These mysteries of calculation were of course
impenetrable to Gray during the moments at
which we see him so almost indescribably exposed
at once and reinforced ; but the effect of the
sharper and sharper sense as of a spring pressed
by his companion was that a whole consciousness
suddenly welled up in him and that within a few
more seconds he had become aware of a need
absolutely adverse to any trap that might be
laid for his candour. He could as little have then
said why as he could vividly have phrased it under
the knowledge to come, but that his mute inter-
locutor desired somehow their association in a
judgment of what his uncle was " worth," a judg-
ment from which a comparatively conceited
nephew might receive an incidental lesson, played
through him as a certitude and produced quite
another inclination. That recognition of the
pleasant on which he had been floating affirmed
itself as in the very face of so embodied a pre-
tension to affirm the direct opposite, to thrust
up at him in fine a horrid contradiction — a

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contradiction which he next heard himself take,
after the happiest fashion, the straightest way to
rebut.

" I'm sure you'll be glad to know that I seem
to be doing my uncle a tremendous lot of good.
They tell me I'm really bringing him round " —
and Graham smiled down at little blanched Mr.
Gaw. " I don't despair at all of his getting much
better."

It was on this that for the first time Mr. Gaw

became articulate. " Better ? " he strangely

quavered, and as if his very eyes questioned such
conscious flippancy.

"Why yes — through cheering him up. He
takes, I gather," Gray went on, " as much pleasure

as I do !" His assurance, however, had

within the minute dropped a little — the effect of
it might really reach, he apprehended, beyond
his idea. The old man had been odd enough, but
now of a sudden he looked sick, and that one
couldn't desire.

' Pleasure ' ? " he was nevertheless able

to echo ; while it struck Gray that no sound so
weak had ever been so sharp, or none so sharp

ever so weak. " Pleasure in dying ? " Mr.

Gaw asked in this flatness of doubt.

" But my dear sir," said Gray, his impulse to
be jaunty still nevertheless holding out a little,
" but, my dear sir, if, as it strikes me, he isn't

dying ? "

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" Oh twaddle ! " snapped Mr. Gaw with the
emphasis of his glare — shifted a moment, Gray
next saw, to a new object in range. Gray felt
himself even before turning for it rejoined by
Miss Mumby, who, rounding the corner of the
house, had paused as in presence of an odd con-
junction ; not made the less odd moreover by
Mr. Gaw's instant appeal to her. " You think he
ain't then going to ? "

He had to leave it at that, but Miss Mumby
supplied, with the loudest confidence, what ap-
peared to be wanted. " He ain't going to get
better ? Oh we hope so ! " she declared to
Graham's delight.

It helped him to contribute in his own way.
" Mr. Gaw's surprise seems for his holding out ! "

" Oh I guess he'll hold out," Miss Mumby was
pleased to say.

" Then if he ain't dying what's the fuss about ? "
Mr. Gaw wanted to know.

"Why there ain't any fuss — but what you
seem to make," Miss Mumby could quite assure
him.

" Oh well, if you answer for it ! " He

got up on this, though with an alertness that,
to Gray's sense, didn't work quite truly, and stood
an instant looking from one of his companions
to the other, while our young man's eyes, for their
part, put a question to Miss Mumby's — a question
which, articulated, would have had the sense of

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" What on earth's the matter with him ? "
There seemed no knowing how Mr. Gaw would
take things — as Miss Mumby, for that matter,
appeared also at once to reflect.

" We're sure enough not to want to have you
sick too," she declared indeed with more cheer
than apprehension ; to which she added, however,
to cover all the ground, " You just leave Mr.
Betterman to us and take care of yourself. We
never say die and we won't have you say it —
either about him or anyone else, Mr. Gaw."

This gentleman, so addressed, straightened and
cleared himself in such a manner as to show that
he saw, for the moment, Miss Mumby 's point ;
which he then, a wondrous small concentration
of studied blankness — studied, that is, his com-
panions were afterwards both to show they had
felt — commemorated his appreciation of in a tiny,
yet triumphant, " Well, that's aU right ! "

" It ain't so right but what I'm going to see
you home," Miss Mumby returned with authority ;
adding, however, for Graham's benefit, that she
had come down to tell him his uncle was now
ready. " You just go right up — you'll find Miss
Goodenough there. And you'll see for yourself,"
she said, " how fresh he is ! "

" Thanks— that will be beautiful ! " Gray
brightly responded ; but with his eyes on Mr.
Gaw, whom of a sudden, somehow, he didn't like
to leave.

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It at any rate determined on the little man's
part a surprised inquiry. " Then you haven't
seen him yet — with your grand account of him ? "

" No — but the account," Gray smiled, " has
an authority beyond mine. Besides," he kept on
after this gallant reference, " I feel what I shall
do for him."

" Oh they'll have great times ! "—Miss Mumby,
with an arm at the old man's service, bravely
guaranteed it. But she also admonished Graham :
" Don't keep him waiting, and mind what Miss
Goodenough tells you ! So now, Mr. Gaw — you're
to mind me \ " she concluded ; while this subject
of her more extemporised attention so far com-
plied as slowly to face with her in the direction
of the other house. Gray wondered about him,
but immensely trusted Miss Mumby, and only
watched till he saw them step off together to the
lawn, Mr. Gaw independent of support, with
something in his consciously stiffened even if not
painfully assumed little air, as noted thus from
behind, that quite warranted his protectress.
Seen that way, yes, he was a tremendous little
person ; and Gray, excited, immensely readvised
and turning accordingly to his own business, felt
the assault of impressions fairly shake him as he
went — shake him though it apparently seemed
most capable of doing but to the effect of hilarity.

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II

WHETHER or no by its so different appearance
from that of Mr. Gaw, the figure propped on
pillows in the vast cool room and lighted in such
a way that the clear deepening west seemed to
flush toward it, through a wide high window,
in the interest of its full effect, impressed our young
man as massive and expansive, as of a beautiful
bland dignity indeed — though emulating Rosanna's
relative, he was at first to gather, by a perfect
readiness to stare rather than speak. Miss Good-
enough had hovered a little, for full assurance,
but then had thrown off with a timbre of voice
never yet used for Gray's own ear in any sick
room, " Well, I guess you won't come to blows ! "
and had left them face to face — besides leaving the
air quickened by the freedom of her humour. They
were face to face for the time across an interval
which, to do her justice, she had not taken upon
herself to deal with directly ; this in spite of
Gray's apprehension at the end of a minute that
she might, by the touch of her hand or the pitch
of her spirit, push him further forward than he
had immediately judged decent to advance. He
had stopped at a certain distance from the great
grave bed, stopped really for consideration and
deference, or through the instinct of submitting
himself first of all to approval, or at least to en-
couragement ; the space, not great enough for

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reluctance and not small enough for presump-
tion, showed him ready to obey any sign his uncle
should make. Mr. Betterman struck him, in this
high quietude of contemplation, much less as
formidable than as mildly and touchingly august ;
he had not supposed him, he became suddenly
aware, so great a person — a presence like that
of some weary veteran of affairs, one of the ad-
mittedly eminent whose last words would be
expected to figure in history. The large fair face,
rather square than heavy, was neither clouded
nor ravaged, but finely serene ; the silver-coloured
hair seemed to bind the broad high brow as with
a band of splendid silk, while the eyes rested on
Gray with an air of acceptance beyond attesta-
tion by the mere play of cheer or the comparative
gloom of relief.

" Ah le beau type, le beau type ! " was during
these instants the visitor's inward comment
breaking into one of the strange tongues that
experience had appointed him privately to use,
in many a case, for the appropriation of aspects
and appearances. It was not till afterwards that
he happened to learn how his uncle had been
capable, two or three hours before seeing him,
of offering cheek and chin to the deft ministration
of a barber, a fact highly illuminating, though
by that time the gathered lights were thick. What
the patient owed on the spot to the sacrifice, he
easily made out, was that look as of the last
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refinement of preparation, that positive splendour
of the immaculate, which was really, on one's
taking it all in, but part of an earnest recognition
of his guest's own dignity. The grave beauty
of the personal presence, the vague anticipation
as of something that might go on to be com-
memorated for its example, the great pure
fragrant room, bathed in the tempered glow of
the afternoon's end, the general lucidity and tran-
quillity and security of the whole presented case,
begot in fine, on our young friend's part, an ex-
traordinary sense that as he himself was important
enough to be on show, so these peculiar perfections
that met him were but so many virtual honours
rendered and signs of the high level to which he
had mounted. On show, yes — that was it, and
more wonderfully than could be said : Gray was
sure after a little of how right he was to stand
off as yet in any interest of his own significance
that might be involved. There was clearly
something his uncle so wanted him to be that he
should run no possible danger of being it to excess,
and that if he might only there and then grasp
it he would ask but to proceed, for decency's sake,
according to his lights : just as so short a time
before a like force of suggestion had played upon
him from Mr. Gaw — each of these appeals clothing
him in its own way with such an oddity of pertin-
ence, such a bristling set of attributes. This wait
of the parties to the present one for articulate

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expression, on either side, of whatever it was that
might most concern them together, promised also
to last as the tension had lasted down on the
verandah, and would perhaps indeed have drawn
itself further out if Gray hadn't broken where he
stood into a cry of admiration — since it could
scarcely be called less — that blew to the winds
every fear of overstepping.

" It's really worth one's coming so far, uncle,
if you don't mind my saying so — it's really worth
a great pilgrimage to see anything so splendid."

The old man heard, clearly, as by some process
that was still deeply active ; and then after a
pause that represented, Gray was sure, no failure
at all of perception, but only the wide embrace
of a possibility of pleasure, sounded bravely back :
" Does it come up to what you've seen ? "

It was Gray rather who was for a moment
mystified — though only to further spontaneity
when he had caught the sense of the question.
" Oh, you come up to everything — by which I
mean, if I may, that nothing comes up to you !
I mean, if I may," he smiled, " that you yourself,
uncle, affect me as the biggest and most native
American impression that I can possibly be ex-
posed to."

" Well," said Mr. Betterman, and again as with
a fond deliberation, " what I'm going to like, I
see, is to listen to the way you talk. That," he
added with his soft distinctness, a singleness of

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note somehow for the many things meant, " that,
I guess, is about what I most wanted you to come
for. Unless it be to look at you too. I like to
look right at you."

" Well/' Gray harmoniously laughed again, " if
even that can give you pleasure— -I" He stood
as for inspection, easily awkward, pleasantly loose,
holding up his head as to make the most of no
great stature. " I've never been so sorry that
there isn't more of me."

The fine old eyes on the pillow kept steadily
taking him in ; he could quite see that he happened
to be, as he might have called it, right ; and though
he had never felt himself, within his years, extra-
ordinarily or excitingly wrong, so that this felicity
might have turned rather flat for him, there was
still matter for emotion, for the immediate throb
and thrill, in finding success so crown him. He
had been spared, thank goodness, any positive
shame, but had never known his brow brushed
or so much as tickled by the laurel or the bay.
" Does it mean," he might have murmured to
himself, " the strangest shift of standards ? " —
but his uncle had meanwhile spoken. " Well,
there's all of you I'm going to want. And there
must be more of you than I see. Because you
are different," Mr. Betterman considered.

" But different from what ? " Truly was Gray
interested to know.

It took Mr. Betterman a moment to say, but

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he seemed to convey that it might have been
guessed. " From what you'd have been if you
had come."

The young man was indeed drawn in. " If
I had come years ago ? Well, perhaps," he so
far happily agreed — " for I've often thought of
that myself. Only, you see," he laughed, " I'm
different from that too. I mean from what I was
when -I didn't come."

Mr. Betterman looked at it quietly. " You're
different in the sense that you're older — and you
seem to me rather older than I supposed. All
the better, all the better," he continued to make
out. " You're the same person I didn't tempt,
the same person I couldn't — that time when I
tried. I see you are, I see what you are."

' You see terribly much, sir, for the few minutes ! "
smiled Gray.

" Oh when I want to see ! " the old man

comfortably enough sighed. " I take you in, I
take you in ; though I grant that I don't quite
see how you can understand. Still," he pursued,
" there are things for you to tell me. You're
different from anything, and if we had time for
particulars I should like to know a little how you've
kept so. I was afraid you wouldn't turn out
perhaps so thoroughly the sort of thing I liked
to think — for I hadn't much more to go upon
than what she said, you know. However," Mr.
Betterman wound up as with due comfort, " it's

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by what she says that I've gone — and I want her
to know that I don't feel fooled."

If Gray's wonderment could have been said to
rest anywhere, hour after hour, long enough to
be detected in the act, the detaining question
would have been more than any other perhaps
that of whether Miss Gaw would " come up."
Now that she did so however, in this quiet way,
it had no strangeness that his being at once glad
couldn't make but a mouthful of ; and the recent
interest of what she had lately written to him
was as nothing to the interest of her becoming
personally his uncle's theme. With which, at the
same time, it was pleasanter to him than anything
else to speak of her himself. " If you allude to
Rosanna Gaw you'll no doubt understand how
tremendously I want to see her."

The sick man waited a little — but not, it quite
seemed, from lack of understanding. " She wants
tremendously to see you, Graham. You might
know that of course from her going to work so."
Then again he gathered his thoughts and again
after a little went on. " She had a good idea,
and I love her for it ; but I'm afraid my own hasn't
been so very much to give her the satisfaction.
I've wanted it myself, and — well, here I am getting
it from you. Yes," he kept up, his eyes never
moving from his nephew, " you couldn't give me
more if you had tried, from so far back, on purpose.
But I can't tell you half ! " He exhaled a long

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breath — he was a little spent. ' You tell me.
You tell me"

" I'm tiring you, sir," Gray said.

" Not by letting me see — you'd only tire me
if you didn't." Then for the first time his eyes
glanced about. " Haven't they put a place for
you to sit ? Perhaps they knew," he suggested,
while Gray reached out for a chair, " perhaps
they knew just how I'd want to see you. There
seems nothing they don't know," he contentedly
threw off again.

Gray had his chair before him, his hands on the
back tilting it a little. ' They're extraordinary.
I've never seen anything like them. They help
me tremendously," he cheerfully confessed.

Mr. Bettennan, at this, seemed to wonder.
" Why, have you difficulties ? "

"Well," said Gray, still with his chair, "you
say I'm different — if you mean it for my being
alien from what I feel surrounding me. But if you
knew how funny all that seems to me," he laughed,
" you'd understand that I clutch at protection."

" ' Funny ' ? "—his host was clearly interested,
without offence, in the term.

" Well then terrific, sir ! "

" So terrific that you need protection ? "

" Well," Gray explained, gently shaking his
chair-back, " when one simply sees that nothing
of one's former experience serves, and that one
doesn't know anything about anything— - ! "

THE IVORY TOWER

More than ever at this his uncle's look might
have covered him. " Anything round here — no !
That's it, that's it," the old man blandly repeated.
That's just the way — I mean the way I hoped.
She knows you don't know — and doesn't want you
to either. But put down your chair," he said ;
and then after, when Gray, instantly and delicately
complying, had placed the precious article with
every precaution back where it had stood : "Sit
down here on the bed. There's margin."

" Yes," smiled Gray, doing with all consider-
ation as he was told, " you don't seem anywhere
very much a I'etroit."

" I presume," his uncle returned, " you know
French thoroughly."

Gray confessed to the complication. " Of course
when one has heard it almost from the cradle ! "

" And the other tongues too ? "

He seemed to wonder if, for his advantage, he
mightn't deny them. " Oh a couple of others.
In the countries there they come easy."

" Well, they wouldn't have come easy here —
and I guess nothing else would ; I mean of the
things we principally grow. And I won't have
you tell me," Mr. Betterman said, " that if you had
taken that old chance they might have done so. We
don't know anything about it, and at any rate it
would have spoiled you. I mean for what you are."

" Oh," returned Gray, on the bed, but pressing

lightly, " oh what I ' am ' ! "

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" My point isn't so much for what you are as for
what you're not. So I won't have anything else ;
I mean I won't have you but as I want you," his
host explained. " I want you just this way."

With which, while the young man kept his
arms folded and his hands tucked away as for
compression of his personal extent and weight,
they exchanged, at their close range, the most
lingering look yet. Extraordinary to him, in the
gravity of this relation, his deeper impression of
something beautiful and spreadingly clear — very
much as if the wide window and the quiet clean
sea and the finer sunset light had all had, for assist-
ance and benediction, their word to say to it.
They seemed to combine most to remark together
" What an exquisite person is your uncle ! " This
is what he had for the minute the sense of taking
from them, and the expression of his assent to it
was in the tone of his next rejoinder. " If I could
only know what it is you'd most like— - ! "

" Never mind what I most like — only tell me,
only tell me," his companion again said : " You
can't say anything that won't absolutely suit me;
in fact I defy you to, though you mayn't at all see
why that's the case. I've got you — without a
flaw. So ! " Mr. Betterman triumphantly breathed.
Gray's sense was by this time of his being ex-
amined and appraised as never in his life before
—very much as in the exposed state of an im-
portant " piece," an object of value picked, for

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finer estimation, from under containing glass.
There was nothing then but to face it, unless
perhaps also to take a certain comfort in his being,
as he might feel, practically clean and in condition.
That such an hour had its meaning, and that the
meaning might be great for him, this of course
surged softly in, more and more, from every point
of the circle that held him ; but with the con-
sciousness making also more at each moment
for an uplifting, a fantastic freedom, a sort of
sublime simplification, in which nothing seemed
to depend on him or to have at any time so de-
pended. He was really face to face thus with
bright immensities, and the handsome old presence
from which, after a further moment, a hand had
reached forth a little to take his own, guaranteed
by the quietest of gestures at once their truth
and the irrelevance, as he could only feel it, of
their scale. Cool and not weak, to his responsive
grasp, this retaining force, to which strength was
added by what next came. " It's not for myself,
it's not for myself — I mean your being as I say.
What do I matter now except to have recognised
it ? No, Graham — it's in another connection."
Was the connection then with Rosanna ? Graham
had time to wonder, and even to think what a big
thing this might make of it, before his uncle brought
out : " It's for the world."

" The world? " — Gray's vagueness again reigned.

" Well, our great public."
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" Oh your great public — - ! "

The exclamation, the cry of alarm, even if also
of amusement in face of such a connection as that,
quickened for an instant the good touch of the cool
hand. " That's the way I like you to sound. It's
the way she told me you would — I mean that would
be natural to you. And it's precisely why — being
the awful great public it is — we require the differ-
ence that you'll make. So you see you're for our
people."

Poor Graham's eyes widened. " I shall make a
difference for your people— - ? "

But his uncle serenely went on. " Don't think
you know them yet, or what it's like over here
at all. You may think so and feel you're pre-
pared. But you don't know till you've had the
whole thing up against you."

" May I ask, sir," Gray smiled, " what you're
talking about ? "

His host met his eyes on it, but let it drop.
" You'll see soon enough for yourself. Don't
mind what I say. That isn't the thing for you
now — it's all done. Only be true," said Mr. Better-
man. ' You are and, as I've said, can't help
yourself." With which he relapsed again to one
of his good conclusions. " And after all don't
mind the public either."

" Oh," returned Gray, " all great publics are
awful."

"Ah no no — I won't have that. Perhaps
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they may be, but the trouble we're concerned
with is about ours — and about some other things
too." Gray felt in the hand's tenure a small
emphasizing lift of the arm, while the head moved
a little as off toward the world they spoke of—
which amounted for our young man, however,
but to a glance at all the outside harmony and
prosperity, bathed as these now seemed in the
colour of the flushed sky. Absurd altogether
that he should be in any way enlisted against
such things. His entertainer, all the same, con-
tinued to see the reference and to point it. " The
enormous preponderance of money. Money is their
life."

" But surely even here it isn't everyone who
has it. Also," he freely laughed, " isn't it a good
thing to have ? "

" A very good thing indeed." Then his uncle
waited as in the longest inspection yet. " But
you don't know anything about it."

" Not about large sums," Gray cheerfully
admitted.

" I mean it has never been near you. That
sticks out of you — the way it hasn't. I knew it
couldn't have been — and then she told me she
knew. I see you're a blank — and nobody here's
a blank, not a creature I've ever touched. That's
what I've wanted," the old man went on — " a
perfect clean blank. I don't mean there aren't
heaps of them that are damned fools, just as there

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are heaps of others, bigger heaps probably, that
are damned knaves ; except that mostly the knave
is the biggest fool. But those are not blanks ;
they're full of the poison — without a blest other
idea. Now you're the blank I want, if you follow
— and yet you're not the blatant ass."

"I'm not sure I quite follow," Gray laughed,
" but I'm very much obliged."

" Have you ever done three cents' worth of
business ? " Mr. Betterman judicially asked.

It helped our young man to some ease of delay.
" Well, I'm afraid I can't claim to have had much
business to do. Also you're wrong, sir," he added,
" about my not being a blatant ass. Oh please
understand that I am a. blatant ass. Let there be
no mistake about that," Gray touchingly pleaded.

' Yes — but not on the subject of anything but
business."

" Well — no doubt on the subject of business
more than on any other."

Still the good eyes rested. ' Tell me one thing,
other than that, for which you haven't at least
some intelligence."

" Oh sir, there are no end of things, and it's odd
one should have to prove that — though it would
take me long. But I allow there's nothing I under-
stand so little and like so little as the mystery of
the ' market ' and the hustle of any sort."

" You utterly loathe and abhor the hustle ! That's
what I blissfully want of you," said Mr. Betterman.

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"You ask of me the declaration ? " Gray

considered. " But how can I know, don't you
see ? — when I am such a blank, when I've never
had three cents' worth of business, as you say, to
transact ? "

" The people who don't loathe it are always
finding it somehow to do, even if preposterously
for the most part, and dishonestly. Your case,"
Mr. Betterman reasoned, " is that you haven't
a grain of the imagination of any such interest.
If you had had," he wound up, " it would have
stirred in you that first time."

Gray followed, as his kinsman called it, enough
to be able to turn his memory a moment on this.
" Yes, I think my imagination, small scrap of a
thing as it was, did work then somehow against
you."

"Which was exactly against business " —the
old man easily made the point. " I was business.
I've been business and nothing else in the world.
I'm business at this moment still — because I can't
be anything else. I mean I've such a head for it.
So don't think you can put it on me that I haven't
thought out what I'm doing to good purpose.
I do what I do but too abominably well." With
which he weakened for the first time to a faint
smile. " It's none of your affair."

"Isn't it a little my affair," Gray as genially
objected, "to be more touched than I can express
by your attention to me — as well (if you'll let me

no

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say so) as rather astonished at it ? " And then
while his host took this without response, only
engaged as to more entire repletion in the steady
measure of him, he added further, even though
aware in sounding it of the complacency or fatuity,
of the particular absurdity, his question might
have seemed to embody : " What in the world
can I want but to meet you in every way ? " His
perception at last was full, the great strange
sense of everything smote his eyes ; so that without
the force of his effort at the most general amenity
possible his lids and his young lips might have
convulsively closed. Even for his own ear
" What indeed ? " was thus the ironic implica-
tion— which he felt himself quite grimace to show
he should have understood somebody else's temp-
tation to make. Here, however, where his uncle's
smile might pertinently have broadened, the
graver blandness settled again, leaving him in
face of it but the more awkwardly assured. He
felt as if he couldn't say enough to abate the ugli-
ness of that — and perhaps it even did come out
to the fact of beauty that no profession of the
decent could appear not to coincide with the very
candour of the greedy. "I'm prepared for any
thing, yes — in the way of a huge inheritance " :
he didn't care if it might sound like that when he
next went on, since what could he do but just
melt to the whole benignity ? " If I only under-
stood what it is I can best do for you,'*

in

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" Do ? The question isn't of your doing, but
simply of your being."

Gray cast about. " But don't they come to
the same thing ? "

" Well, I guess that for you they'll have to."

' Yes, sir," Gray answered — " but suppose I
should say ' Don't keep insisting so on me ' ? "
Then he had a romantic flight which was at the
same time, for that moment at least, a sincere
one. " I don't know that I came out so very
much for myself."

" Well, if you didn't it only shows the more
what you are" — Mr. Betterman made the point
promptly. " It shows you've got the kind of
imagination that has nothing to do with the kind
I so perfectly see you haven't. And if you don't
do things for yourself," he went on, " you'll be
doing them the more for just what I say." With
which too, as Graham but pleadingly gaped :
" You'll be doing them for everyone else — that
is finding it impossible to do what they do. From
the moment they notice that — well, it will be
what I want. We know, we know," he remarked
further and as if this quite settled it.

Any ambiguity in his " we " after an instant
cleared up ; he was to have alluded but ever so
sparely, through all this scene, to Rosanna Gaw,
but he alluded now, and again it had for Gray
an amount of reference that was like a great sum
of items in a bill imperfectly scanned. None the

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less it left him desiring still more clearness. His
whole soul centred at this point in the need not
to have contributed by some confused accommoda-
tion to a strange theory of his future. Strange
he could but feel this one to be, however simply,
that is on however large and vague an assumption,
it might suit others, amid their fathomless re-
sources and their luxuries or perversities of waste,
to see it. He wouldn't be smothered in the vague,
whatever happened, and had now the gasp and
upward shake of the head of a man in too deep
water. " What I want to insist on," he broke
out with it, " is that I mustn't consent to any
exaggeration in the interest of your, or of any
other, sublime view of me, view of my capacity
of any sort. There's no sublime view of me to
be taken that consorts in the least with any truth ;
and I should be a very poor creature if I didn't
here and now assure you that no proof in the
world exists, or has for a moment existed, of my
being capable of anything whatever."

He might have supposed himself for a little to
have produced something of the effect that would
naturally attach to a due vividness in this truth
— for didn't his uncle now look at him just a shade
harder, before the fixed eyes closed, indeed, as
under a pressure to which they had at last really
to yield ? They closed, and the old white face
was for the couple of minutes so thoroughly still
without them that a slight uneasiness quickened
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THE IVORY TOWER

him, and it would have taken but another moment
to make a slight sound, which he had to turn his
head for the explanation of, reach him as the re-
sponse to an appeal. The door of the room,
opening gently, had closed again behind Miss
Goodenough, who came forward softly, but with
more gravity, Gray thought, than he had previously
seen her show. Still in his place and conscious
of the undiminished freshness of her invalid's
manual emphasis, he looked at her for some
opinion as to the latter's appearance, or to the
move on his own part next indicated ; during
which time her judgment itself, considering Mr.
Betterman, a trifle heavily waited. Gray's
doubt, before the stillness which had followed so
great even if so undiscourageable an effort, moved
him to some play of disengagement ; whereupon
he knew himself again checked, and there, once
more, the fine old eyes rested on him. "I'm
afraid I've tired him out," he could but say to
the nurse, who made the motion to feel her patient's
pulse without the effect of his releasing his visitor.
Gray's hand was retained still, but his kinsman's eyes
and next words were directed to Miss Goodenough.

" It's all right — even more so than I told you
it was going to be."

" Why of course it's all right — you look too
sweet together ! " she pronounced.

" But I mean I've got him ; I mean I make him
squirm " — which words had somehow the richest

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gravity of any yet ; " but all it does for his re-
sistance is that he squirms right to me."

"Oh we won't have any resistance ! " Miss
Goodenough freely declared. ' Though for all

the fight you've got in you still ! " she in

fine altogether backed Mr. Betterman.

He covered his nephew again as for a final or
crushing appraisement, then going on for Miss
Goodenough's benefit : "He tried something a
minute ago to settle me, but I wish you could
just have heard how he expressed himself."

" It is a pleasure to hear him — when he's good ! "
She laughed with a shade of impatience.

" He's never so good as when he wants to be
bad. So there you are, sir ! " the old man said.
" You're like the princess in the fairy-tale ; you've
only to open your mouth —

" And the pearls and diamonds pop out ! "
Miss Goodenough, for her patient's relief, com-
pleted his meaning. " So don't try for toads and
snakes ! " she promptly went on to Gray. To
which she added with still more point : " And
now you must go."

" Not one little minute more ? " His uncle
still held him.

" Not one, sir ! " Miss Goodenough decided.

" It isn't to talk," the old man explained. " I
like just to look at him."

"So do I," said Miss Goodenough ; " but we
can't always do everything we like."

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"No then, Graham — remember that. You'd
like to have persuaded me that I don't know what
I mean. But you must understand you haven't."

His hand had loosened, and Gray got up, turn-
ing a face now flushed and a little disordered from
one of them to the other. " I don't pretend to
understand anything ! "

It turned his uncle to their companion. " Isn't
he fine ? "

" Of course he's fine," said Miss Goodenough ;
" but you've quite worn him out."

" Have I quite worn you out ? " Mr. Betterman
calmly inquired.

As if indeed finished, each thumb now in a
pocket of his trousers, the young man dimly
smiled. " I think you must have — quite."

" Well, let Miss Mumby look after you. He'll find
her there ? " his uncle asked of her colleague. And
then as the latter showed at this her first indecision,
" Isn't she somewhere round ? " he demanded.

Miss Goodenough had wavered, but as if it
really mattered for the friend there present she
responsibly concluded. " Well, no — just for a
while." And she appealed to Gray's indulgence.
" She's had to go to Mr. Gaw."

" Why, is Mr. Gaw sick ? " Mr. Betterman
asked with detachment.

" That's what we shall know when she comes
back. She'll come back all right," she continued
for Gray's encouragement.

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He met it with proper interest. " I'm sure I
hope so ! "

" Well, don't be too sure ! " his uncle judiciously
said.

"Oh he has only borrowed her." Miss Good-
enough smoothed it down even as she smoothed
Mr. Betterman's sheet, while with the same move-
ment of her head she wafted Gray to the door.

" Mr. Gaw," her patient returned, " has bor-
rowed from me before. Mr. Gaw, Graham ! "

" Yes sir ? " said Gray with the door ajar
and his hand on the knob.

The fine old presence on the pillow had faltered
before expression ; then it appeared rather sigh-
ingly and finally to give the question up. " Well,
Mr. Gaw's an abyss."

Gray found himself suddenly responsive. " Isn't
he, the strange man ? "

" The strange man — that's it." This summary
description sufficed now to Mr. Betterman's
achieved indifference. " But you've seen him ? "

" Just for an instant."

" And that was enough ? "

" Well, I don't know." Gray himself gave it
up. " You're all so fiercely interesting ! "

" I think Rosanna's lovely ! " Miss Goodenough
contributed, to all appearance as an attenuation,
while she tucked their companion in.

" Oh Miss Gaw's quite another matter," our
young man still paused long enough to reply.

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" Well, I don't mean but what she's interesting
in her way too," Miss Goodenough's conscience
prompted.

" Oh he knows all about her. That's all right,"
Mr. Betterman remarked for his nurse's benefit.

" Why of course I know it," this lady candidly
answered. " Miss Mumby and I have had to feel
that. I guess he'll want to send her his love," she
continued across to Gray.

" To Miss Mumby ? " asked Gray, his general
bewilderment having moments of aggravation.

"Why no — she's sure of his affection. To
Miss Gaw. Don't you want," she inquired of her
patient, " to send your love to that poor anxious
girl ? M

" Is she anxious ? " Gray returned in advance
of his uncle.

Miss Goodenough hung fire but a moment.
" Well, I guess I'd be in her place. But you'll
see."

" Then," said Gray to his host, " if Rosanna's
in trouble I'll go to her at once."

The old man, at this, once more delivered him-
self. " She won't be in trouble — any more than
I am. But tell her— tell her ! "

" Yes, sir " — Gray had again to wait.

But Miss Goodenough now would have no more
of it. " Tell her that we're about as fresh as we
can live ! "—the wave of her hand accompanying
which Gray could take at last for his dismissal.

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III

IT was nevertheless not at once that he sought
out the way to find his old friend ; other questions
than that of at once seeing her hummed for the
next half-hour about his ears — an interval spent
by him in still further contemplative motion
within his uncle's grounds. He strolled and
stopped again and stared before him without
seeing ; he came and went and sat down on
benches and low rocky ledges only to get up and
pace afresh ; he lighted cigarettes but to smoke
them a quarter out and then chuck them away
to light others. He said to himself that he was
enormously agitated, agitated as never in his life
before, but that, strangely enough, he disliked
that condition far less than the menace of it
would have made him suppose. He didn't, how-
ever, like it enough to say to himself " This is
happiness ! "—as could scarcely have failed if the
kind of effect on his nerves had really consorted
with the kind of advantage that he was to under-
stand his interview with his uncle to have promised
him ; so far, that is, as he was yet to understand
anything. His after-sense of the scene expanded
rather than settled, became an impression of one
of those great insistent bounties that are not of
this troubled world ; the anomaly expressing
itself in such beauty and dignity, with all its
elements conspiring together, as would have done

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honour to a great page of literary, of musical or
pictorial art. The huge grace of the matter ought
somehow to have left him simply captivated—
so at least, all wondering, he hung about there
to reflect ; but excess of harmony might apparently
work like excess of discord, might practically be
a negation of the idea of the quiet life. Ignoble
quiet he had never asked for — this he could now
with assurance remember ; but something in the
pitch of his uncle's guarantee of big things, what-
ever they were, which should at the same time
be pleasant things, seemed to make him an accom-
plice in some boundless presumption. In what
light had he ever seen himself that made it proper
the pleasant should be so big for him or the big
so pleasant ? Suddenly, as he looked at his watch
and saw how the time had passed — time already,
didn't it seem, of his rather standing off and quak-
ing ? — it occurred to him that the last thing he
had proposed to himself in the whole connection
was to be either publicly or privately afraid ; in
the act of noting which he became aware again
of Miss Mumby, who, having come out of the
house apparently to approach him, was now at no
great distance. She rose before him the next
minute as in fuller possession than ever of his
fate, and yet with no accretion of reserve in her
own pleasure at this.

" What I want you to do is just to go over to
Miss Gaw."

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" It's just what / should like, thank you — and
perhaps you'll be so good as to show me the way."
He wasn't quite succeeding in not being afraid
— that a moment later came to him ; since if this
extraordinary woman was in touch with his destiny
what did such words on his own part represent
but the impulse to cling to her and, as who should
say, keep on her right side ? His uncle had spoken
to him of Rosanna as protective — and what better
warrant for such a truth than that here was he
thankful on the spot even for the countenance
of a person speaking apparently in her name ?
All of which was queer enough, verily — since it
came to the sense of his clutching for immediate
light, through the now gathered dusk, at the surge
of guiding petticoats, the charity of women more
or less strange. Miss Mumby at once took charge
of him, and he learnt more things still before they
had proceeded far. One of these truths, though
doubtless the most superficial, was that Miss
Gaw proposed he should dine with her just as he
was — he himself recognising that with her father
suddenly and to all appearance gravely ill it
was no time for vain forms. Wasn't the rather
odd thing, none the less, that the crisis should
have suggested her desiring company ? — being as
it was so acute that the doctor, Doctor Hatch
himself, would even now have arrived with a
nurse, both of which pair of ears Miss Mumby
required for her report of those symptoms in their

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new patient that had appealed to her practised
eye an hour before. Interesting enough withal
was her explanation to Gray of what she had noted
on Mr. Gaw's part as a consequence of her join-
ing them at that moment under Mr. Betterman's
roof ; all the more that he himself had then
wondered and surmised — struck as he was with
the effect on the poor man's nerves of their visitor's
announcement that her prime patient had
brightened. Mr. Gaw but too truly, our young
man now learned, had taken that news ill — as,
given the state of his heart, any strong shock
might determine a bad aggravation. Such a shock
Miss Mumby had, to her lively regret, administered,
though she called Gray's attention to the prompt
and intelligent action of her remorse. Feeling
at once responsible she had taken their extra-
ordinary little subject in charge — with every care
indeed not to alarm him ; to the point that, on
his absolute refusal to let her go home with him
and his arresting a hack, on the public road, which
happened to come into view empty, the two had
entered the vehicle and she had not lost sight of
him till, his earnest call upon his daughter at Mrs.
Bradham's achieved, he had been in effect re-
stored to his own house. His daughter, who lived
with her eyes on his liability to lapses, was now
watching with him, and was well aware, Miss
Mumby averred, of what the crisis might mean ;
as to whose own due presence of mind in the con-

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nection indeed how could there be better proof
than this present lucidity of her appeal to Mr.
Betterman's guest on such a matter as her prompt
thought for sparing him delay ?

" If she didn't want you to wait to dress, it can
only be, I guess, to make sure of seeing you before
anything happens," his guide was at no loss to
remark ; " and if she can mention dinner while
the old gentleman is — well, as he is — it shows she's
not too beside herself to feel that you'll at any
rate want yours."

" Oh for mercy's sake don't talk of dinner ! "
Gray pulled up under the influence of these revela-
tions quite impatiently to request. " That's not
what I'm most thinking of, I beg you to believe,
in the midst of such prodigies and portents."
They had crossed the small stretch of road which
separated Mr. Betterman's gate from that of the
residence they were addressed to ; and now,
within the grounds of this latter, which loomed
there, through vague boskages, with an effect of
windows numerously and precipitately lighted,
the forces of our young friend's consciousness
were all in vibration at once. " My wondrous
uncle, I don't mind telling you, since you're so
kind to me, has given me more extraordinary
things to think of than I see myself prepared in
any way to do justice to ; and if I'm further to
understand you that we have between us, you
and I, destroyed this valuable life, I leave you to

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judge whether what we may have to face in con-
sequence finds me eager."

" How do you know it's such a valuable life ? "
Miss Mumby surprisingly rejoined ; sinking that
question, however, in a livelier interest, before
his surprise could express itself. " If she has sent
me for you it's because she knows what she's
about, and because I also know what I am — so
that, wanting you myself so much to come, I guess
I'd have gone over for you on my own responsi-
bility. Why, Mr. Fielder, your place is right here
by her at such a time as this, and if you don't
already realise it I'm very glad I've helped you."

Such was the consecration under which, but
a few minutes later, Gray found himself turning
about in the lamp-lit saloon of the Gaws very
much as he had a few hours before revolved at
the other house. Miss Mumby had introduced
him into this apartment straight from the terrace
to which, in the warm air, a long window or two
stood open, and then had left him with the assur-
ance that matters upstairs would now be in shape
for their friend to join him at once. It was perhaps
because he had rather inevitably expected matters
upstairs — and this in spite of his late companion's
warning word — to assault him in some fulness
with Miss Gaw's appearance at the door, that a
certain failure of any such effect when she did
appear had for him a force, even if it was hardly
yet to be called a sense, beyond any air of her

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advancing on the tide of pain. He fairly took
in, face to face with her, that what she first called
for was no rattle of sound, however considerately
pitched, about the question of her own fear ; she
had pulled no long face, she cared for no dismal
deference : she but stood there, after she had
closed the door with a backward push that took
no account, in the hushed house, of some possible
resonance, she but stood there smiling in her mild
extravagance of majesty, smiling and smiling as
he had seen women do as a preface to bursting
into tears. He was to remember afterwards how
he had felt for an instant that whatever he said
or did would deprive her of resistance to an in-
ward pressure which was growing as by the sight
of him, but that she would thus break down much
more under the crowned than under the menaced
moment — thanks to which appearance what
could be stranger than his inviting her to clap
her hands ? Still again was he later to recall that
these hands had been the moment after held in
his own while he knew himself smiling too and
saying : " Well, well, well, what wonders and what
splendours ! " and seeing that though there was
even more of her in presence than he had reckoned
there was somehow less of her in time ; as if she
had at once grown and grown and grown, grown
in all sorts of ways save the most natural one of
growing visibly older. Such an oddity as that
made her another person a good deal more than

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THE IVORY TOWER

her show of not having left him behind by any
break with their common youth could keep her
the same.

These perceptions took of course but seconds,
with yet another on their heels, to the effect that
she had already seen him, and seen him to some
fine sense of pleasure, as himself enormously
different — arriving at that clearness before they
had done more than thus waver between the " fun,"
all so natural, of their meeting as the frankest
of friends and the quite other intelligence of their
being parties to a crisis. It was to remain on
record for him too, and however overscored, that
their crisis, surging up for three or four minutes
by its essential force, suffered them to stand there,
with irrelevant words and motions, very much
as if it were all theirs alone and nobody's else,
nobody's more important, on either side, than
they were, and so take a brush from the wing of
personal romance. He let her hands go, and then,
if he wasn't mistaken, held them afresh a moment
in repeated celebration, he exchanged with her
the commonest remarks and the flattest and the
easiest, so long as it wasn't speaking but seeing,
and seeing more and more, that mattered : they
literally talked of his journey and his arrival and
of whether he had had a good voyage and wasn't
tired ; they said " You sit here, won't you ? "
and " Shan't you be better there ? " — they said
" Oh I'm all right ! " and " Fancy it's happening

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THE IVORY TOWER

after all like this ! " before there even faintly
quavered the call of a deeper note. This was
really because the deep one, from minute to minute,
was that acute hush of her so clearly finding him
not a bit what she might have built up. He had
grown and grown just as she had, certainly ; only
here he was for her clothed in the right interest
of it, not bare of that grace as he fancied her guess-
ing herself in his eyes, and with the conviction
sharply thrust upon him, beyond any humour
he might have cultivated, that he was going to
be so right for her and so predetermined, whatever
he did and however he should react there under
conditions incalculable, that this would perhaps
more overload his consciousness than ease it. It
could have been further taken for strange, had
there been somebody so to note it, that even when
their first vaguenesses dropped what she really at
once made easiest for him was to tell her that the
wonderful thing had come to pass, the thing she
had whisked him over for — he put it to her that
way ; that it had taken place in conditions too
exquisite to be believed, and that under the be-
wilderment produced by these she must regard
him as still staggering.

' Then it's done, then it's done — as I knew it
would be if he could but see you." Flushed, but
with her large fan held up so that scarce more
than her eyes, their lids drawn together in the
same nearsighted way he remembered, presented

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THE IVORY TOWER

themselves over it, she fairly hunched her high
shoulders higher for emphasis of her success. The
more it might have embarrassed her to consider
him without reserve the more she had this relief,
as he took it, of her natural, her helpful blinking ;
so that what it came to really for her general
advantage was that the fine closing of the eyes,
the fine thing in her big face, but expressed effective
scrutiny. Below her in stature — as various other
men, for that matter, couldn't but be — he hardly
came higher than her ear ; and he for the shade
of an instant struck himself as a small boy, liter-
ally not of man's estate, reporting, under some
research, just to the amplest of mothers. He
had reported to Mr. Betterman, so far as intent
candour in him hadn't found itself distraught,
and for the half hour had somehow affronted the
immeasurable ; but that didn't at all prevent his
now quick sense of his never in his life having
been so watched and waited upon by the un-
charted infinite, or so subject to its operation —
since infinites, at the rate he was sinking in, could
apparently operate, and do it too without growing
smaller for the purpose. He cast about, not at
all upright on the small pink satin sofa to which
he had unconsciously dropped ; it was for him
clearly to grow bigger, as everything about ex-
pressively smiled, smiled absolutely through the
shadow cast by doctors and nurses again, in sug-
gestion of ; which, naturally, was what one would

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THE IVORY TOWER

always want to do — but which any failure of, he
after certain moments perfectly felt, wouldn't
convert to the least difference for this friend. How
could that have been more established than by her
neglect of his having presently said, out of his
particular need, that he would do anything in
reason that was asked of him, but that he fairly

ached with the desire to understand ? She

blinked upon his ache to her own sufficiency, no
doubt ; but no further balm dropped upon it
for the moment than by her appearing to brood
with still deeper assurance, in her place and her
posture, on the beauty of the accomplished fact,
the fact of her performed purpose and her freedom
now but to take care — yes, herself take care —
for what would come of it. She might understand
that he didn't — all the way as yet ; but nothing
could be more in the line of the mild and mighty
mother than her treating that as a trifle. It
attenuated a little perhaps, it just let light into
the dark warmth of her spreading possession of
what she had done, that when he had said, as a
thing already ten times on his lips and now quite
having to come out, " I feel some big mistake
about me somehow at work, and want to stop it
in time ! " she met this with the almost rude
decision of " There's nothing you can stop now,
Graham, for your fate, or our situation, has the
gained momentum of a rush that began ever so
far away and that has been growing and growing,
i 129

THE IVORY TOWER

It would be too late even if we wanted to — and
you can judge for yourself how little that's my wish.
So here we are, you see, to make the best of it."

" When you talk of my ' fate/ " he allowed
himself almost the amusement of answering, " you
freeze the current of my blood ; but when you
say ' our situation/ and that we're in it together,
that's a little better, and I assure you that I shall
not for a moment stay in anything, whatever it
may be, in which you're not close beside me. So
there you are at any rate — and I matter at least
as much as this, whatever the mistake : that I
have hold of you as tight as ever you've been held
in your life, and that, whatever and whatever the
mistake, you've got to see me through."

" Well, I took my responsibility years ago, and
things came of it " — so she made reply ; " and the
other day I took this other, and now this has come
of it, and that was what I wanted, and wasn't
afraid of, and am not afraid of now — like the fears
that came to me after the Dresden time." No
more direct than that was her answer to his pro-
test, and what she subjoined still took as little
account of it. "I rather lost them, those old
fears — little by little ; but one of the things I
most wanted the other day was to see whether
before you here they wouldn't wholly die down.
They're over, they're over," she repeated ; "I
knew three minutes of you would do it — and not
a ghost of them remains."

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THE IVORY TOWER

" I can't be anything but glad that you shouldn't
have fears — and it's horrid to me to learn, I assure
you," he said, " that I've ever been the occasion
of any. But the extent to which," he then frankly
laughed, " ' three minutes ' of me seems to be
enough for people ! "

He left it there, just throwing up his arms,
passive again as he had accepted his having to be
in the other place ; but conscious more and more
of the anomaly of her showing so markedly at
such an hour a preoccupation, and of the very
intensest, that should not have her father for its
subject. Nothing could have more represented
this than her abruptly saying to him, without
recognition of his point just made, so far as it
might have been a point : "If your impression
of your uncle, and of his looking so fine and being
so able to talk to you, makes you think he has
any power really to pick up or to last, I want you
to know that you're wholly mistaken. It has
kept him up," she went on, " and the effect may
continue a day or two more — it will, in fact, till
certain things are done. But then the flicker will
have dropped — for he won't want it not to. He'll
feel all right. The extraordinary inspiration, the
borrowed force, will have spent itself — it will die
down and go out, but with no pain. There has
been at no time much of that," she said, " and
now I'm positively assured there's none. It can't
come back — nothing can but the weakness. It's

THE IVORY TOWER

too lovely/' she remarkably added — " so there
indeed and indeed we are/'

To take in these words was to be, after a fashion
he couldn't have expressed, on a basis of reality
with her the very rarest and queerest ; so that,
bristling as it did with penetrative points, her
speech left him scarce knowing for the instant
which penetrated furthest. That she made no
more of anything he himself said than if she had
just sniffed it as a pale pink rose and then tossed
it into the heap of his other sweet futilities, such
another heap as had seemed to grow up for him
in his uncle's room, this might have pressed
sharpest hadn't something else, not wholly over-
scored by what followed, perhaps pricked his
consciousness most. " ' It,' you say, has kept
him up ? May I ask you what ' it ' then may so
wonderfully have been ? "

She had no more objection to say than she
apparently had difficulty. " Why, his having
let me get at him. That was to make the whole
difference."

It was somehow as much in the note of their
reality as anything could well be ; which was
perhaps why he could but respond with " Oh
I see ! " and remain lolling a little with a sense
of flatness — a flatness moreover exclusively his
own.

So without flatness of her own she didn't even
mind his ; something in her brushed quite above

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THE IVORY TOWER

it while she observed next, as if it were the most
important thing that now occurred to her : " That
of course was my poor father's mistake." And
then as Gray but stared : "I mean the idea that
he can pick up."

" It's your father's mistake that he can ? "

She met it as if really a shade bewildered at his
own misconception ; she was literally so far off
from any vision of her parent in himself, a philo-
sopher might have said, that it took her an instant
to do the question justice. " Oh no — I mean that
your uncle can. It was your own report of that
to him, with Miss Mumby backing you, that put
things in the bad light to him."

" So bad a light that Mr. Gaw is in danger by
it ? " This was catching on of a truth to realities
— and most of all to the one he had most to face.
" I've been then at the bottom of that ? "

He was to wonder afterwards if she had very
actually gone so far as to let slip a dim smile for
the intensity of his candour on this point, or
whether her so striking freedom from intensity
in the general connection had but suggested to
him one of the images that were most in opposition.
Her answer at any rate couldn't have had more
of the eminence of her plainness. " That you
yourself, after your uncertainties, should have
found Mr. Betterman surprising was perfectly
natural — and how indeed could you have dreamed
that father so wanted him to die ? " And then

THE IVORY TOWER

as Gray, affected by the extreme salience of this
link in the chain of her logic, threw up his head
a little for the catching of his breath, her supreme
lucidity, and which was lucidity all in his interest,
further shone out. " Father is indeed ill. He has
had these bad times before, but nothing quite
of the present gravity. He has been in a critical
state for months, but one thing has kept him alive
— the wish to see your uncle so far on his way
that there could be no doubt. It was the appear-
ance of doubt so suddenly this afternoon that
gave him the shock." She continued to explain
the case without prejudice. " To take it there
from you for possible that Mr. Betterman might
revive and that he should have in his own so
unsteady condition to wait was simply what
father couldn't stand."

" So that I just dealt the blow ? "

But it was as if she cared too little even to try
to make that right. " He doesn't want, you see,
to live after."

" After having found he is mistaken ? "
She had a faint impatience. " He isn't of course
really — since what I told you of your uncle is true.
And he knows that now, having my word for it."
Gray couldn't be clear enough about her clear-
ness. " Your word for it that my uncle has revived
but for the moment ? "

" Absolutely. Wasn't my giving him that,"
Rosanna asked, " a charming filial touch ? "

THE IVORY TOWER

This was tremendously much again to take in,
but Gray's capacity grew. " Promising him, you
mean, for his benefit, that my uncle shan't last ? "

The size of it on his lips might fairly, during
the instant she looked at him, have been giving
her pleasure. " Yes, making it a bribe to father's
patience."

" Then why doesn't the bribe act ? "

" Because it comes too late. It was amazing,"
she pursued, " that, feeling as he did, he could
take that drive to the Bradhams' — and Miss
Mumby was right in perfectly understanding that.
The harm was already done — and there it is."

She had truly for the whole reference the most
astounding tones. ' You literally mean then,"
said Gray, " that while you sit here with me he's
dying — dying of my want of sense ? "

"You've no want of sense"— she spoke as if
this were the point really involved. " You've
a sense the most exquisite — and surely you had
best take in soon rather than late," she went on,
" how you'll never be free not to have on every
occasion of life to reckon with it and pay for it."

" Oh I say ! " was all the wit with which he
could at once meet this charge ; but she had risen
as she spoke and, with a remark about there being
another matter, had moved off to a piece of furni-
ture at a distance where she appeared to take
something from a drawer unlocked with a sharp
snap for the purpose. When she returned to him

THE IVORY TOWER

she had this object in her hand, and Gray recog-
nised in it an oblong envelope, addressed, largely
sealed in black, and seeming to contain a voluminous
letter. She kept it while he noted that the seal
was intact, and she then reverted not to the dis-
comfiture she had last produced in him but to his
rueful reference of a minute before that.

" He's not dying of anything you said or did,
or of anyone's act or words. He's just dying of
twenty millions."

" Twenty millions ? " There was a kind of
enormity in her very absence of pomp, and Gray
felt as if he had dropped of a sudden, from his
height of simplicity, far down into a familiar
relation to quantities inconceivable — out of which
depths he fairly blew and splashed to emerge,
the familiar relation, of all things in the world,
being so strange a one. " That's what you mean
here when you talk of money ? "

" That's what we mean," said Rosanna, " when
we talk of anything at all — for of what else but
money do we ever talk ? He's dying, at any rate,"
she explained, " of his having wished to have to
do with it on that sort of scale. Having to do
with it consists, you know, of the things you do
for it — which are mostly very awful ; and there
are all kinds of consequences that they eventually
have. You pay by these consequences for what
you have done, and my father has been for a long
time paying." Then she added as if of a sudden

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THE IVORY TOWER

to summarise and dismiss the whole ugly truth :
"The effect has been to dry up his life." Her
eyes, with this, reached away for the first time
as in search of something not at all before her,
and it was on the perfunctory note that she had
the next instant concluded. " There's nothing at
last left for him to pay with."

For Gray at least, whatever initiations he had
missed, she couldn't keep down the interest. " Mr.
Gaw then will leave twenty millions — - ? "

" He has already left them — in the sense of
having made his will ; as your uncle, equally to
my knowledge, has already made his." Some-
thing visibly had occurred to her, and in connection,
it might seem, with the packet she had taken from
her drawer. She looked about — there being within
the scene, which was somehow at once blank and
replete, sundry small scattered objects of an ex-
pensive negligibility ; not one of which, till now,
he could guess, had struck her as a thing of human
application. Human application had sprung up,
the idea of selection at once following, and she
unmistakeably but wondered what would be best
for her use while she completed the statement
on which she had so strikingly embarked. " He
has left me his whole fortune." Then holding up
an article of which she had immediately after-
wards, with decision, proceeded to possess herself,
" Is that a thing you could at all bear ? " she
irrelevantly asked. She had caught sight, in her

137

THE IVORY TOWER

embarrassed way, of something apparently adapted
to her unexplained end, and had left him afresh
to assure herself of its identity, taking up from a
table at first, however, a box in Japanese lacquer
only to lay it down unsatisfied. She had circled
thus at a distance for a time, allowing him now
his free contemplation ; she had tried in succession,
holding them close to her eyes, several embossed
or embroidered superfluities, a blotting-book
covered with knobs of malachite, a silver box,
flat, largely circular and finely fretted, a gold
cigar case of absurd dimensions, of which she
played for a moment the hinged lid. Such was
the object on which she puzzlingly challenged him.

" I could bear it perhaps better if I ever used
cigars."

"You don't smoke ? " she almost wailed.

" Never cigars. Sometimes pipes — but mostly,
thank goodness, cigarettes."

" Thank the powers then indeed ! " — and, the
golden case restored to the table, where she had
also a moment before laid her prepared missive,
she went straight to a corner of the mantel-shelf,
hesitations dropping from her, and, opening there
a plainer receptacle than any she had yet touched,
turned the next instant with a brace of cigarettes
picked out and an accent she had not yet used.
" You are a blessing, Gray — I'm nowhere without
one ! " There were matches at hand, and she had
struck a light and applied it, at his lips, to the

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THE IVORY TOWER

cigarette passively received by him, afterwards
touching her own with it, almost before he could
wonder again at the oddity of their transition.
Their light smoke curled while she went back to
her table ; it quickened for him with each puff
the marvel of a domestic altar graced at such a
moment by the play of that particular flame.
Almost, to his fine vision, it made Rosanna different
— for wasn't there at once a gained ease in the
tone with which, her sealed letter still left lying
on the table, she returned to that convenience
for the pocket of the rich person of which she had
clicked and re-clicked the cover? What strange
things, Gray thought, rich persons had ! — and
what strange things they did, he might mentally
even have added, when she developed in a way
that mystified him but the more : "I don't mean
for your cigars, since you don't use them ; but I
want you to have from my hand something in which
to keep, with all due consideration, a form of
tribute that has been these last forty-eight hours
awaiting you here, and which, it occurs to me,
would just slide into this preposterous piece of
furniture and nestle there till you may seem to
feel you want it." She proceeded to recover the
packet and slide it into the case, the shape of which,
on a larger scale, just corresponded with its own,
and then, once more making the lid catch, shook
container and contents as sharply as she might
have shaken a bottle of medicine. " So — there

'39

THE IVORY TOWER

it is ; I somehow don't want just to thrust at
you the letter itself."

" But may I be told what the letter itself is ? "
asked Gray, who had followed these movements
with interest.

" Why of course — didn't I mention ? Here
are safely stowed," she said, her gesture causing
the smooth protective surfaces to twinkle more
brightly before him, " the very last lines (and
many there appear to be of them ! ) that, if I am
not mistaken, my father's hand will have traced.
He wrote them, in your interest, as he considers,
when he heard of your arrival in New York, and,
having sealed and directed them, gave them to
me yesterday to take care of and deliver to you.
I put them away for the purpose, and an hour
ago, during our drive back from Mrs. Bradham's,
he reminded me of my charge. Before asking
Miss Mumby to tell you I should like to see you
I transferred the letter from its place of safety
in my room to the cabinet from which, for your
benefit, I a moment ago took it. I carefully comply,
as you see, with my father's request. I know
nothing whatever of what he has written you,
and only want you to have his words. But I want
also," she pursued, " to make just this little affair
of them. I want " — and she bent her eyes on the
queer costliness, rubbing it with her pockethand-
kerchief — " to do what the Lord Mayor of London
does, doesn't he ? when he offers the Freedom

140

THE IVORY TOWER

of the City ; present them in a precious casket
in which they may always abide. I want in short/'
she wound up, " to put them, for your use, beauti-
fully away."

Gray went from wonder to wonder. " It isn't
then a thing you judge I should open at once ? "

" I don't care whether you never open it in your
life. But you don't, I can see, like that vulgar
thing ! " With which having opened her re-
ceptacle and drawn forth from it the subject of
her attention she tossed back to its place on the
spread of brocade the former of these trifles. The
big black seal, under this discrimination, seemed
to fix our young man with a sombre eye.

" Is there any objection to my just looking at
the letter now ? " And then when he had taken
it and yet was on the instant and as by the mere
feel and the nearer sight, rather less than more
conscious of a free connection with it, " Is it going
to be bad for me ? " he said.

" Find out for yourself ! "

" Break the seal ? "

" Isn't it meant to break ? " she asked with a
shade of impatience.

He noted the impatience, sounding her nervous-
ness, but saw at the same time that her interest
in the communication, whatever it might be, was
of the scantest, and that she suffered from having
to defer to his own. "If I needn't answer

to-night ! "

141

THE IVORY TOWER

" You needn't answer ever."

" Oh well then it can wait. But you're right
— it mustn't just wait in my pocket."

This pleased her. " As I say, it must have a
place of its own."

He considered of that. " You mean that when
I have read it I may still want to treasure it ? "

She had in hand again the great fan that hung
by a long fine chain from her girdle, and, flaring
it open, she rapidly closed it again, the motion
seeming to relieve her. " I mean that my father
has written you at this end of his days — and that
that's all I know about it."

" You asked him no question ? "

"As to why he should write ? I wouldn't,"
said Rosanna, " have asked him for the world.
It's many a day since we've done that, either he
or I — at least when a question could have a sense."

" Thank you then," Gray smiled, " for answer-
ing mine." He looked about him for whatever
might still help them, and of a sudden had a light.
" Why the ivory tower ! " And while her eyes
followed : " That beautiful old thing on the top
of the secretary — happy thought if it is old ! "
He had seen at a glance that this object was what
they wanted, and, a nearer view confirming the
thought, had reached for it and taken it down.
" There it was waiting for you. Isn't it an ivory
tower, and doesn't living in an ivory tower just
mean the most distinguished retirement ? I don't

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THE IVORY TOWER

want yet awhile to settle in one myself — though
I've always thought it a thing I should like to
come to ; but till I do make acquaintance with
what you have for me a retreat for the mystery
is pleasant to think of." Such was the fancy he
developed while he delicately placed his happy
find on the closed and polished lid of the grand
piano, where the rare surface reflected the pale
rich ivory and his companion could have it well
before her. The subject of this attention might
indeed pass, by a fond conceit, on its very reduced
scale, for a builded white-walled thing, very tall
in proportion to the rest of its size and rearing its
head from its rounded height as if a miniature
flag might have flown there. It was a remarkable
product of some eastern, probably some Indian,
patience, and of some period as well when patience
in such causes was at the greatest — thanks to which
Gray, loving ancient artistry and having all his
life seen much of it, had recognised at a glance
the one piece in the room that presented an interest.
It consisted really of a cabinet, of easily moveable
size, seated in a circular socket of its own material
and equipped with a bowed door, which dividing
in the middle, after a minute gold key had been
turned, showed a superposition of small drawers
that went upwards diminishing in depth, so that
the topmost was of least capacity. The high
curiosity of the thing was in the fine work required
for making and keeping it perfectly circular;

THE IVORY TOWER

an effect arrived at by the fitting together, ap-
parently by tiny golden rivets, of numerous small
curved plates of the rare substance, each of these,
including those of the two wings of the exquisitely
convex door, contributing to the artful, the total
rotundity. The series of encased drawers worked
to and fro of course with straight sides, but also
with small bowed fronts, these made up of the
same adjusted plates. The whole, its infinite
neatness exhibited, proved a wonder of wasted
ingenuity, and Rosanna, pronouncing herself
stupid not to have anticipated him, rendered all
justice, under her friend's admiring emphasis, to
this choicest of her resources. Of how they had
come by it, either she or her sparing parent, she
couldn't at once bethink herself : on their taking
the Newport house for the few weeks her direction
had been general that an assortment of odds and
ends from New York should disperse itself, for
mitigation of bleakness, in as many of the rooms
as possible ; and with quite different matters to
occupy her since she had taken the desired effect
for granted. Her father's condition had precluded
temporary inmates, and with Gray's arrival also
in mind she had been scarce aware of minor
importances. " Of course you know — I knew
you would ! " were the words in which she assented
to his preference for the ivory tower and which
settled for him, while he made it beautifully slide,
the fact that the shallowest of the drawers would

144

THE IVORY TOWER

exactly serve for his putting his document to
sleep. So then he slipped it in, rejoicing in the
tight fit of the drawer, carefully making the two
divisions of the protective door meet, turning the
little gold key in its lock and finally, with his
friend's permission, attaching the key to a small
silver ring carried in his pocket and serving for a
cluster of others. With this question at rest it
seemed at once, and as with an effect out of pro-
portion to the cause, that a great space before
them had been cleared : they looked at each other
over it as if they had become more intimate,
and as if now, in the free air, the enormities
already named loomed up again. All of which
was expressed in Gray's next words.

" May I ask you, in reference to something
you just now said, whether my uncle took action
for leaving me money before our meeting could
be in question ? Because if he did, you know,
I understand less than ever. That he should want
to see me if he was thinking of me, that of course
I can conceive ; but that he shouldn't wait till
he had seen me is what I find extraordinary."

If she gave him the impression of keeping her
answer back a little, it wasn't, he was next to see, that
she was not fully sure of it. "He had seen you."
' You mean as a small boy ? "

" No — at this distance of time that didn't count."
She had another wait, but also another assurance.
" He had seen you in the great fact about you."

THE IVORY TOWER

" And what in the world do you call that ? "

" Why, that you are more out of it all, out of
the air he has breathed all his life and that in these
last years has more and more sickened him, than
anyone else in the least belonging to him, that he
could possibly put his hand on."

He stood before her with his hands in his pockets
— he could study her now quite as she had studied
himself. " The extent, Rosanna, to which you
must have answered for me ! "

She met his scrutiny from between more nar-
rowed lids. " I did put it all to him — I spoke for
you as earnestly as one can ever speak for another.
But you're not to gather from it," she thus a trifle
awkwardly smiled, " that I have let you in for
twenty millions, or for anything approaching.
He will have left you, by my conviction, all he
has ; but he has nothing at all like that. That's
all I'm sure of — of no details whatever. Even
my father doesn't know," she added ; "in spite
of its having been for a long time the thing he has
most wanted to, most sat here, these weeks, on
some chance of his learning. The truth, I mean,
of Mr. Betterman's affairs."

Gray felt a degree of relief at the restrictive
note on his expectations which might fairly have
been taken, by its signs, for a betrayed joy in their
extent. The air had really, under Rosanna's
touch, darkened itself with numbers ; but what
she had just admitted was a rift of light. In this

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THE IVORY TOWER

light, which was at the same time that of her
allusion to Mr. Gaw's unappeased appetite, his
vision of that gentleman at the other house came
back to him, and he said in a moment : "I
see, I see. He tried to get some notion out of
me."

" Poor father ! " she answered to this — but
without time for more questions, as at the moment
she spoke the door of the room opened and Doctor
Hatch appeared. He paused, softly portentous,
where he stood, and so he met Rosanna's eyes.
He held them a few seconds, and the effect was to
press in her, to all appearance, the same spring
our young man had just touched. " Poor, poor,
poor father ! " she repeated, but as if brought
back to him from far away. She took in what
had happened, but not at once nor without an
effort what it called on her for ; so that " Won't
you come up ? " her informant had next to ask.

To this, while Gray watched her, she rallied
— " If you'll stay here." With which, looking
at neither of them again, as the Doctor kept the
door open, she passed out, he then closing it on
her and transferring his eyes to Gray — who hadn't
to put a question, so sharply did the raised and
dropped hands signify that all was over. The
fact, in spite of everything, startled our young
man, who had with his companion a moment's
mute exchange.

" He has died while I've kept her here ? "

THE IVORY TOWER

Doctor Hatch just demurred. " You kept her
through her having sent for you to talk to you."

' Yes, I know. But it's very extraordinary ! "

" You seem to make people extraordinary.
You've made your uncle, you know ! "

' Yes indeed — but haven't I made him better ? "
Gray asked.

The Doctor again for a moment hesitated. ' Yes
— in the sense that he must be now at last really
resting. But I go back to him."

" I'll go with you of course," said Gray, look-
ing about for his hat. As he found it he oddly
remembered. " Why she asked me to dinner ! "

It all but amused the Doctor. " You inspire
remarkable efforts."

" Well, I'm incapable of making them." It
seemed now queer enough. " I can't stay to
dinner."

" Then we'll go." With which however, Doctor
Hatch was not too preoccupied to have had his
attention, within the minute, otherwise taken.
" What a splendid piece ! " he exclaimed in
presence of the ivory tower.

" It is splendid," said Gray, feeling its beauty
again the brightest note in the strangeness; but
with a pang of responsibility to it taking him too.
" Miss Gaw has made me a present of it."

"Already? You do work them!"— and the
good physician fairly grazed again the act of mirth.
" So you'll take it away ? "

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THE IVORY TOWER

Gray paused a moment before his acquisition,
which seemed to have begun to guard, within
the very minute, a secret of greater weight. Then
" No, I'll come back to it," he said as they de-
parted by the long window that opened to the
grounds and through which Miss Mumby had
brought him in.

149

BOOK THIRD

" WHY I haven't so much as seen him yet/'
Cissy perforce confessed to her friend, Mrs. Brad-
ham's friend, everybody's friend, even, already
and so coincidentally, Graham Fielder's ; this
recipient of her avowal having motored that day
from Boston, after detention there under a necessity
of business and the stress of intolerable heat, but
having reached Newport in time for tea, a bath,
a quick "change" and a still quicker impression
of blest refreshment from the fine air and from
various other matters. He had come forth again,
during the time left him between these performed
rites and the more formal dressing-hour, in un-
disguised quest of our young lady, who had so
disposed certain signs of her whereabouts that
he was to waste but few steps in selection of a
short path over the longest stretch of lawn and
the mass of seaward rocks forming its limit.
Arriving to spend with the Bradhams as many
or as few days as the conditions to be recognised

THE IVORY TOWER

on the spot might enjoin, this hero, Horton Vint,
had alighted at one of those hours of brilliant
bustle which could show him as all in his element
if he chose to appear so, or could otherwise appeal
at once to his perfect aptitude for the artful escape
and the undetected counterplot. But the pitch
had by that moment dropped and the company
dispersed, so far as the quarter before him was
concerned : the tennis-ground was a velvet void,
the afternoon breeze conveyed soft nothings —
all of which made his occasion more spacious for
Horton. Cissy, from below, her charmingly cool
cove, had watchfully signalled up, and they met
afresh, on the firm clear sand where the drowsy
waves scarce even lapsed, with forms of intimacy
that the sequestered spot happily favoured. The
sense of waiting understood and crowned gave
grace to her opened arms when the young man,
as he was still called, erect, slim, active, brightly
refreshed and, like herself, given the temperature,
inconsiderably attired, first showed himself against
the sky ; it had cost him but a few more strides
and steps, an easy descent, to spring to her welcome
with the strongest answering emphasis. They
met as on ground already so prepared that not
an uncertainty, on either side, could make reunion
less brave or confidence less fine ; they had to
effect no clearance, to stand off from no risk ;
and, observing them thus in their freedom, you
might well have asked yourself by what infallible

THE IVORY TOWER

tact they had mastered for intercourse such perfect
reciprocities of address. You would certainly
have concluded to their entire confidence in these.
"With a dozen people in the house it is luck,"
Horton had at once appreciatively said ; but when
their fellow-visitors had been handled between
them for a minute or so only to collapse again
like aproned puppets on removal of pressure from
the squeak, he had jumped to the question of
Gray Fielder and to frank interest in Cissy's news
of him. This news, the death of Mr. Betterman
that morning, quite sufficiently explained her
inability to produce the more direct impression ;
that worthy's nephew and heir, in close and more
and more quickened attendance on him during
the previous days, had been seen as yet, to the
best of her belief, by no one at all but dear Davey
— not counting of course Rosanna Gaw, of the
fact of whose own bereavement as well Horton
was naturally in possession, and who had made
it possible, she understood, for their friend to call
on Graham.

" Oh Davey has called on Graham ? " Horton
was concerned to ask while they sat together on
a rude worn slab. " What then, if he has told
you, was his particular idea ? "

" Won't his particular idea," Cissy returned,
" be exactly the one he won't have told me ?
What he did speak to me of yesterday morning,
and what I told him I thought would be beautiful

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THE IVORY TOWER

of him, was his learning by inquiry, in case your
friend could see him, whether there was any sort
of thing he could do for him in his possible want
of a man to put a hand on. Because poor Rosanna,
for all one thinks of her," said the girl, " isn't
exactly a man."

Morton's attention was deeply engaged ; his
hands, a little behind him, rested, as props to his
slight backward inclination, on the convenient
stone ; his legs, extended before him, enabled
him to dig in his heels a little, while his eyes,
attached to the stretch of sea commanded by their
rocky retreat, betrayed a fixed and quickened
vision. Rich in fine lines and proportions was
his handsome face — with scarce less, moreover,
to be said of his lean, light and long-drawn, though
so much more pointed and rounded figure. His
features, after a manner of their own, announced
an energy and composed an array that his ex-
pression seemed to disavow, or at least to be
indifferent to, and had the practical effect of toning
down ; as if he had been conscious that his nose,
of the bravest, strongest curve and intrinsically
a great success, was too bold and big for its social
connections, that his mouth protested or at least
asserted more than he cared to back it up to, that
his chin and jaw were of too tactless an importance,
and his fine eyes, above all, which suggested choice
samples of the more or less precious stone called
aquamarine, too disposed to darken with the

'53

THE IVORY TOWER

force of a straight look — so that the right way
to treat such an excess of resource had become
for him quite the incongruous way, the cultivation
of every sign and gage that liberties might be taken
with him. He seemed to keep saying that he was
not, temperamentally and socially, in his own
exaggerated style, and that a bony structure, for
instance, as different as possible from the one
he unfortunately had to flaunt, would have been
no less in harmony with his real nature than he
sought occasion to show it was in harmony with
his conduct. His hard mouth sported, to its visible
relief and the admiration of most beholders, a
beautiful mitigating moustache ; his eyes wan-
dered and adventured as for fear of their very
own stare ; his smile and his laugh went all lengths,
you would almost have guessed, in order that
nothing less pleasant should occupy the ground ;
his chin advanced upon you with a grace fairly
tantamount to the plea, absurd as that might
have seemed, that it was in the act of receding.
Thus you gained the impression — or could do so
if your fancy quickened to him — that he would
perhaps rather have been as unwrought and un-
finished as so many monstrous men, on the general
peopled scene of those climes, appeared more and
more to show themselves, than appointed to
bristle with a group of accents that, for want of
a sense behind them, could attach themselves
but to a group of blanks. The sense behind the

THE IVORY TOWER

outward man in Horton Vint bore no relation,
it incessantly signified, to his being importantly
goodlooking ; it was in itself as easily and freely
human a sense, making as much for personal re-
assurance, as the appeal of opportunity in an
enjoying world could ever have drawn forth and
with the happy appearance of it confirmed by
the whimsical, the quite ironic, turn given by the
society in which he moved to the use of his name.
It could never have been so pronounced and
written Haughty if in spite of superficial accidents
his charming clever humility and sociability hadn't
thoroughly established themselves. He lived in
the air of jokes, and yet an air in which bad ones
fell flat ; and there couldn't have been a worse
one than to treat his designation as true.

It might have been, at the same time, scarce
in the least as a joke that he presently said, in
return for the remark on Cissy's part last reported :
" Rosanna is surely enough of a man to be much
more of one than Davey. However/' he went
on, " we agree, don't we ? about the million of
men it would have taken to handle Gussy. A
Davey the more or the less, or with a shade more
or less of the different sufficiency, would have
made no difference in that question " — which had
indeed no interest for them anyhow, he conveyed,
compared with the fun apparently proposed by
this advent of old Gray. That, frankly, was to him,
Horton, as amusing a thing as could have happened

THE IVORY TOWER

— at a time when if it hadn't been for Cissy's her-
self happening to be for him, by exception, a com-
fort to think of, there wasn't a blest thing in his
life of the smallest interest. " It hadn't struck
me as probable at all, this revulsion of the old
man's/' he mentioned, " and though Fielder must
be now an awfully nice chap, whom you'll like
and find charming, I own I didn't imagine he
would come so tremendously forward. Over
there, simply with his tastes, his ' artistic interests,'
or literary ones, or whatever — I mean his array
of intellectual resources and lack of any others —
he was well enough, by my last impression, and
I liked him both for his decent life and ways and
for his liking me, if you can believe it, so extra-
ordinarily much as he seemed to. What the
situation appears most to mean, however, is that
of a sudden he pops into a real light, a great blazing
light visible from afar — which is quite a different
affair. It can't not mean at least all sorts of odd
things — or one has a right to wonder if it mayn't
mean them." And Horton might have been taken
up for a minute of silence with his consideration
of some of these glimmering possibilities ; a
moment during which Cissy Foy maintained their
association by fairly, by quite visibly breathing
with him in unison — after a fashion that testified
more to her interest than any " cutting in " could
have done. It would have been clear that they
were far beyond any stage of association at which

156

THE IVORY TOWER

their capacity for interest in the contribution of
either to what was between them should depend
upon verbal proof. It depended in fact as little
on any other sort, such for instance as searching
eyes might invoke ; she hadn't to look at her
friend to follow him further — she but looked off
to those spaces where his own vision played, and
it was by pressing him close there that she followed.
Her companion's imagination, by the time he
spoke again, might verily have travelled far.

" What comes to me is just the wonder of whether
such a change of fortune may possibly not spoil
him — he was so right and nice as he was. I re-
member he used really to exasperate me almost
by seeming not to have wants, unless indeed it was
by having only those that could be satisfied over
there as a kind of matter of course and that were
those I didn't myself have — in any degree at
least that could make up for the non-satisfaction
of my others. I suppose it amounted really,"
said Horton, " to the fact that, being each without
anything to speak of in our pockets, or then any
prospect of anything, he accepted that because
he happened to like most the pleasures that were
not expensive. I on my side raged at my inability
to meet or to cultivate expense — which seemed
to me good and happy, quite the thing most worth
while, in itself : as for that matter it still seems.
' La lecture et la promenade ', which old Roulet,
our pasteur at Neuchatel used so to enjoin on us

THE IVORY TOWER

as the highest joys, really appealed to Gray, to
all appearance, in the sense in which Roulet re-
garded, or pretended to regard, them — once he
could have pictures and music and talk, which
meant of course pleasant people, thrown in. He
could go in for such things on his means — ready
as he was to do all his travelling on foot (I wanted
as much then to do all mine on horseback,) and
to go to the opera or the play in the shilling seats
when he couldn't go in the stalls. I loathed
so everything but the stalls — the stalls everywhere
in life — that if I couldn't have it that way I didn't
care to have it at all. So when I think it strikes
me I must have liked him very much not to have
wanted to slay him — for I don't remember having
given way at any particular moment to threats
or other aggressions. That may have been because
I felt he rather extravagantly liked me — as I
shouldn't at all wonder at his still doing. At the
same time if I had found him beyond a certain
point objectionable his showing he took me for
anything wonderful would have been, I think,"
the young man reflected, " but an aggravation
the more. However that may be, I'm bound to
say, I shan't in the least resent his taking me for
whatever he likes now — if he can at all go on with
it himself I shall be able to hold up my end. The
dream of my life, if you must know all, dear — the
dream of my life has been to be admired, really
admired, admired for all he's worth, by some

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THE IVORY TOWER

awfully rich man. Being admired by a rich woman
even isn't so good — though I've tried for that
too, as you know, and equally failed of it ; I mean
in the sense of their being ready to do it for all
they are worth. I've only had it from the poor,
haven't I ? — and we've long since had to recognise,
haven't we ? how little that has done for either
of us." So Horton continued — so, as if incited
and agreeably, irresistibly inspired, he played,
in the soft stillness and the protected nook, before
the small salt tide that idled as if to listen, with
old things and new, with actualities and possi-
bilities, on top of the ancientries, that seemed
to want but a bit of talking of in order to flush
and multiply. ' There's one thing at any rate
I'll be hanged if I shall allow," he wound up ;
" I'll be hanged if what we may do for him shall
—by any consent of mine at least — spoil him for
the old relations without inspiring him for the
new. He shan't become if I can help it as beastly
vulgar as the rest of us."

The thing was said with a fine sincere ring,
but it drew from Cissy a kind of quick wail of
pain. " Oh, oh, oh — what a monstrous idea,
Haughty, that he possibly could, ever ! "

It had an immediate, even a remarkable effect ;
it made him turn at once to look at her, giving his
lightest pleasantest laugh, than which no sound
of that sort equally manful had less of mere male
stridency. Then it made him, with a change of

'59

THE IVORY TOWER

posture, shift his seat sufficiently nearer to her
to put his arm round her altogether and hold her
close, pressing his cheek a moment, with due pre-
cautions, against her hair. " That's awfully nice
of you. We will pull something off. Is what
you're thinking of what your friend out there
dans le temps, the stepfather, Mr. Wendover, was
it ? told you about him in that grand manner ? "

" Of course it is," said Cissy in lucid surrender
and as if this truth were of a flatness almost to
blush for. " Don't you know I fell so in love with
Mr. Northover, whose name you mispronounce,
that I've kept true to him forever, and haven't
been really in love with you in the least, and shall
never be with Gray himself, however much I may
want to, or you perhaps may even try to make
me ? — any more than I shall ever be with anyone
else. What's inconceivable," she explained, " is
that anyone that dear delicious man thought
good enough to talk of to me as he talked of his
stepson should be capable of anything in the least
disgusting in any way."

" I see, I see." It made Horton, for reasons,
hold her but the closer — yet not withal as if
prompted by her remarks to affectionate levity.
It was a sign of the intercourse of this pair that,
move each other though they might to further
affection, and therewith on occasion to a congruous
gaiety, they treated no cause and no effect of that
sort as waste ; they had somehow already so

160

THE IVORY TOWER

worked off, in their common interest, all possible
mistakes and vain imaginings, all false starts and
false pursuits, all failures of unanimity. " Why
then if he's really so decent, not to say so superior,"
Haughty went on, " won't it be the best thing
in the world and a great simplification for you
to fall — that is for you to be — in love with him?
That will be better for me, you know, than if you're
not ; for it's the impression evidently made on
you by the late Nort hover that keeps disturbing
my peace of mind. I feel, though I can't quite tell
you why," he explained, " that I'm never going
to be in the least jealous of Gray, and probably
not even so much as envious ; so there's your
chance — take advantage of it all the way. Like
him at your ease, my dear, and God send he shall
like you ! Only be sure it's for himself you do it
—and for your own self ; as you make out your
possibilities, de part et d'autre, on your getting
nearer to them."

"So as to be sure, you mean," Cissy inquired,
" of not liking him for his money ? "

II

HE waited a moment, and if she had not immedi-
ately after her words sighed " Oh dear, oh dear ! "
in quite another, that is a much more serious, key,
the appearance would perhaps have been that
L 161

THE IVORY TOWER

for once in a blue moon she had put into his mind
a thought he couldn't have. He couldn't have
the thought that it was of the least importance
she should guard herself in the way she mentioned ;
and it was in the air, the very next thing, that she
couldn't so idiotically have strayed as to mean
to impute it. He quickly enough made the point
that what he preferred was her not founding her
interest in Gray so very abjectly on another man's
authority — given the uncanny fact of the other
man's having cast upon her a charm which time
and even his death had done so little to abate.
Yes, the late Northover had clearly had some-
thing about him that it worried a fellow to have
her perpetually rake up. There she was in peril
of jealousy — his jealousy of the queer Northover
ghost ; unless indeed it was she herself who was
queerest, ridden as her spirit seemed by sexa-
genarian charms ! He could look after her with
Gray — they were at one about Gray ; what would
truly alienate them, should she persist, would be
his own exposure to comparison with the memory
of a rococo Briton he had no arms to combat.
Which extravagance of fancy had of course after
a minute sufficiently testified to the clearance of
their common air that invariably sprang from their
feeling themselves again together and finding
once more what this came to — all under sublime
palpability of proof. The renewed consciousness
did perhaps nothing for their difficulties as such,

162

THE IVORY TOWER

but it did everything for the interest, the amuse-
ment, the immediate inspiration of their facing
them : there was in that such an element of their
facing each other and knowing, each time as if
they had not known it before, that this had
absolute beauty. It had unmistakably never
had more than now, even when their freedom in
it had rapidly led them, under Cissy's wonderment,
to a consideration of whether a happy relation
with their friend (he was already thus her friend
too, without her ever having seen him !) mightn't
have to count with some inevitable claim, some
natural sentiment, asserted and enjoyed on
Rosanna's part, not to speak of the effect on
Graham himself of that young woman's at once
taking such an interest in him and coming in for
such a fortune.

" In addition to which who shall pretend to
deny," the girl earnestly asked, " that Rosanna
has in herself the most extraordinary charm ? "
" Oh you think she has extraordinary charm ? "
" Of course I do — and so do you : don't be
absurd ! She's simply superb," Cissy expounded,
" in her own original way, which no other woman
over here — except me a little perhaps ! — has so
much as a suspicion of anything to compare with ;
and which, for all we know, constitutes a luxury
entirely at Graham's service." Cissy required but a
single other look at it all to go on : "I shouldn't in
the least wonder if they were already engaged."

THE IVORY TOWER

" I don't think there's a chance of it," Haughty
said, " and I hold that if any such fear is your
only difficulty you may be quite at your ease. Not
only do I so see it," he went on, " but I know why
I do."

Cissy just waited. ' You consider that because
she refused Horton Vint she'll decline marriage
altogether ? "

" I think that throws a light," this gentleman
smiled — " though it isn't all my ground. She
turned me down, two years ago, as utterly as I
shall ever have been turned in my life — and if I
chose so to look at it the experience would do for
me beautifully as that of an humiliation served
up to a man in as good form as he need desire.
That it was, that it still is when I live it through
again ; that it will probably remain, for my com-
fort— in the sense that I'm likely never to have a
worse. I've had my dose," he figured, "of that
particular black draught, and I've got the bottle
there empty on the shelf."

" And yet you signify that you're all the same

glad ? " Cissy didn't for the instant wholly

follow.

" Well, it all came to me then ; and that it did
all come is what I have the advantage of now —
I mean, you see, in being able to reassure you as
I do. I had some wonderful minutes with her—
it didn't take long," Haughty laughed. " We
saw in those few minutes, being both so horribly

164

THE IVORY TOWER

intelligent ; and what I recognised has remained
with me. What she did is her own affair — and
that she could so perfectly make it such, without
leaving me a glimmer of doubt, is what I have,
as I tell you, to blink at forever. I may ask my-
self if you like/' he pursued, " why I should ' mind '
so much if I saw even at the moment that she
wasn't at any rate going to take someone else —
and if you do I shall reply that I didn't need that
to make it bad. It was bad enough just in itself.
My point is, however/' Horton concluded, " that
I can give you at least the benefit of my feeling
utterly sure that Gray will have no chance. She's
in the dreadful position — and more than ever
of course now — of not being able to believe she
can be loved for herself."

' You mean because you couldn't make her
believe it ? " asked Cissy after taking this in.

" No — not that, for I didn't so much as try.
I didn't — and it was awfully superior of me, you
know — approach her at all on that basis. That,"
said Horton, " is where it cuts. The basis was
that of my own capacity only — my capacity to
serve her, in every particular, with every aptitude
I possess in the world, and which I could see she
saw I possess (it was given me somehow to send
that home to her !) without a hair's breadth over-
looked. I shouldn't have minded her taking me
so for impossible, blackly impossible, if she had
done it under an illusion ; but she really believed

165

THE IVORY TOWER

in me as a general value, quite a first-rate value
— that I stood there and didn't doubt. And yet
she practically said ' You ass ! '

His encircling arm gained, for response to this,
however, but the vibration of her headshake —
without so much as any shudder at the pain he so
vividly imaged. " She practically said that she
was already then in love with Mr. Graham, and you
wouldn't have had a better chance had a passion
of your own stuck out of you. If I thought she
didn't admire you," Cissy said, " I shouldn't be
able to do with her at all — it would be too stupid
of her ; putting aside her not accepting you, I
mean — for a woman can't accept every man she
admires. I suppose you don't at present object,"
she continued, " to her admiring Mr. Graham
enough to account for anything ; especially as it
accounts so for her having just acted on his behalf
with such extraordinary success. Doesn't that
make it out for him," she asked, " that he's admired
by twenty millions plus the amount that her re-
conciliation of him with his uncle just in time to
save it, without an hour to spare, will represent
for his pocket ? We don't know what that lucky
amount may be—

"No, but we more or less shall"— Horton took
her straight up. " Of course, without exaggeration,
that will be interesting — even though it will be
but a question, I'm quite certain, of comparatively
small things. Old Betterman — there are people

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who practically know, and I've talked with them
— isn't going to foot up to any faint likeness of
what Gaw does. That, however, has nothing to
do with it : all that is relevant — since I quite allow
that, speculation for speculation, our association
in this sort represents finer fun than it has yet
succeeded in doing in other sorts — all that's rele-
vant is that when you've seen Gray you mayn't
be in such a hurry to figure him as a provoker of
insatiable passions. Your insidious Northover has,
as you say, worked you up, but wait a little to see
if the reality corresponds."

" He showed me a photograph, my insidious
Northover," Cissy promptly recalled ; "he was
naif enough, poor dear, for that. In fact he made
me a present of several, including one of himself ;
I owe him as well two or three other mementos,
all of which I've cherished."

" What was he up to anyway, the old cor-
rupt er of your youth ?" — Hort on seemed really
to wonder. " Unless it was that you simply re-
duced him to infatuated babble."

" Well, there are the photographs and things
to show," she answered unembarrassed — " though
I haven't them with me here ; they're put away in
New York. His portrait's extremely good-looking."

" Do you mean Mr. Northover's own ? "

" Oh his is of course quite beautiful. But I
mean Mr. Fielder's — at his then lovely age. I
remember it," said Cissy, " as a nice, nice face."

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Haughty on his side indulged in the act of
memory, concluding after an instant to a head-
shake. " He isn't at all remarkable for looks ;
but putting his nice face at its best, granting that
he has a high degree of that advantage, do you
see Rosanna so carried away by it as to cast every-
thing to the winds for him ? "

Cissy weighed the question. " We've seen
surely what she has been carried away enough
to do."

" She has had other reasons — independent of
headlong passion. And remember," he further
argued — " if you impute to her a high degree of
that sort of sensibility — how perfectly proof she
was to my physical attractions, which I declare
to you without scruple leave the very brightest
you may discover in Gray completely in the shade."

Again his companion considered. " Of course
you're dazzlingly handsome ; but are you, my
dear, after all — I mean in appearance — so very
interesting ? "

The inquiry was so sincere that it could be met
but in the same spirit. " Didn't you then find
me so from the first minute you ever looked at
me? "

" We're not talking of me," she returned, " but
of people who happen to have been subjects less
predestined and victims less abject. What," she
then at once went on, " is Gray's appearance
' anyway ' ? Is he black, to begin with, or white,

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or betwixt and between ? Is he little or big or
neither one thing or t'other ? Is he fat or thin
or of ' medium weight ' ? There are always such
lots to be told about people, and never a creature
in all the wide world to tell. Even Mr. Northover,
when I come to think of it, never mentioned his
size."

" Well, you wouldn't mention it," Horton
amiably argued. The appeal, he showed withal,
stirred him to certain recoveries. " And I should
call him black — black as to his straight thick
hair, which I see rather distinctively ' slick ' and
soigne — the hair of a good little boy who never
played at things that got it tumbled. No, he's
only very middling tall ; in fact so very middling,"
Haughty made out, " that it probably comes to
his being rather short. But he has neither a hump
nor a limp, no marked physical deformity of any
sort ; has in fact a kind of futile fidgetty quick-
ness which suggests the little man, and the ner-
vous and the active and the ready ; the ready,
I mean, for anything in the way of interest and
talk — given that the matter isn't too big for him.
The ' active ', I say, though at the same time,"
he noted, " I ask myself what the deuce the activity
will have been about."

The girl took in these impressions to the effect
of desiring still more of them. " Doesn't he happen
then to have eyes and things ? "

" Oh yes "—Horton bethought himself—" lots
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and lots of eyes, though not perhaps so many of
other things. Good eyes, fine eyes, in fact I think
anything whatever you may require in the way of
eyes."

;< Then clearly they're not ' black ' : I never
require black ones," she said, " in any conceivable
connection : his eyes — blue-grey, or grey-blue,
whichever you may call it, and far and away the
most charming kind when one doesn't happen to
be looking into your glorious green ones — his
satisfactory eyes are what will more than anything
else have done the business. They'll have done
it so," she went on, " that if he isn't red in the
face, which I defy him to be, his features don't
particularly matter — though there's not the least
reason either why he should have mean or common
ones. In fact he hasn't them in the photograph,
and what are photographs, the wretched things,
but the very truth of life ? "

" He's not red in the face," Haughty was able
to state — " I think of him rather as of a pale,
very pale, clean brown ; and entirely unaddicted,"
he felt sure, " to flushing or blushing. What I
do sort of remember in the feature way is that
his teeth though good, fortunately, as they're
shown a good deal, are rather too small and square ;
for a man's, that is, so that they make his smile
a trifle—

" A trifle irresistible of course," Cissy broke in
— " through their being, in their charming form,

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of the happy Latin model ; extremely like my
own, be so good as to notice for once in your life,
and not like the usual Anglo-Saxon fangs. You're
simply describing, you know," she added, " about
as gorgeous a being as one could wish to see."

" It's not I who am describing him — it's you,
love ; and ever so delightfully." With which,
in consistency with that, he himself put a question.
" What does it come to, by the way, in the sense
of a moustache ? Does he, or doesn't he after all,
wear one ? It's odd I shouldn't remember, but
what does the photograph say ? "

" It seems odd indeed / shouldn't " — Cissy had
a moment's brooding. She gave herself out as
ashamed. " Fancy my not remembering if the
photograph is moustachue \ "

" It can't be then very," Horton contributed
— the point was really so interesting.

" No," Cissy tried to settle, " the photograph
can't be so very moustachue."

" His moustaches, I mean, if he wears 'em,
can't be so very prodigious ; or one could scarcely
have helped noticing, could one ? "

" Certainly no one can ever have failed to notice
yours — and therefore Gray's, if he has any, must
indeed be very inferior. And yet he can't be
shaved like a sneak-thief — or like all the world
here," she developed ; " f or I won't have him
with nothing at all any more than I'll have him
with anything prodigious, as you say ; which is

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worse than nothing. When I say I won't have
him with nothing," she explained, " I mean I
won't have him subject to the so universally and
stupidly applied American law that every man's
face without exception shall be scraped as clean,
as glabre, as a fish's — which it makes so many of
them so much resemble. I won't have him so,"
she said, " because I won't have him so idiotically
gregarious and without that sense of differences
in things, and of their relations and suitabilities,
which such exhibitions make one so ache for. If
he's gregarious to that sort of tune we must re-
nounce our idea — that is you must drop yours —
of my working myself up to snatch him from the
arms of Rosanna. I must believe in him, for that,
I must see him at least in my own way," she
pursued ; " believing in myself, or even believing
in you, is a comparative detail. I won't have
him bristle with horrid demagogic notes. I
shouldn't be able to act a scrap on that basis."

It was as if what she said had for him the interest
at once of the most intimate and the most en-
larged application ; it was in fact as if she alone
in all the world could touch him in such fine ways
—could amuse him, could verily instruct him, to
anything like such a tune. " It seems peculiarly
a question of bristles if it all depends on his mous-
tache. Our suspense as to that, however, needn't
so much ravage us," Haughty added, " when we
remember that Davey, who, you tell me, will by

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this time have seen him, can settle the question
for us as soon as we meet at dinner. It will by
the same stroke then settle that of the witchcraft
which has according to your theory so bedevilled
poor dear Rosanna's sensibility — leading it such
a dance, I mean, and giving such an empire to
certain special items of our friend's 'personality',
that the connection was practically immediate
with his brilliant status."

Ill

HORTON, looking at his watch, had got up as he
spoke — which Cissy at once also did under this
recall of the lapse of their precious minutes. There
was a point, however, left for her to make ; which
she did with the remark that the item they had
been discussing in particular couldn't have been
by itself the force that had set their young woman
originally in motion, inasmuch as Gray wouldn't
have had a moustache when a small boy or what-
ever, and as since that young condition, she under-
stood, Rosanna hadn't again seen him. A pro-
position to which Haughty's assent was to remain
vague, merged as it suddenly became in the cry
of " Hello, here he is ! " and a prompt gay bran-
dish of arms up at their host Bradham, arrayed
for the evening, white-waistcoated and button-
holed, robustly erect on an overlooking ledge

THE IVORY TOWER

and explaining his presence, from the moment it
was thus observed, by calling down that Gussy
had sent him to see if she wasn't to expect them
at dinner. It was practically a summons to Cissy,
as the girl easily recognised, to leave herself at
least ten minutes to dress decently — in spite of the
importance of which she so challenged Davey on
another score that, as a consequence, the good
gorgeous man, who shone with every effect of the
bath and every resource of the toilet, had within
the pair of minutes picked out such easiest patent-
leather steps as would enable him to convict the
companions of a shameless dawdle. She had had
time to articulate for Horton's benefit, with no
more than due distinctness, that he must have
seen them, and Horton had as quickly found the
right note and the right wit for the simple re-
assurance " Oh Davey ! " As occupants of

a place of procrastination that they only were
not such fools as to leave unhaunted they frankly
received their visitor, any impulse in whom to
sprinkle stale banter on their search for solitude
would have been forestalled, even had it been
supposable of so perfect a man of the world, by
the instant action of his younger guest's strategic
curiosity.

" Has he, please, just has he or no, got a mous-
tache ? "—she appealed as if the fate of empires
depended on it.

" I've been telling her," Horton explained,

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" whatever I can remember of Gray Fielder, but
she won't listen to anything if I can't first be sure
as to that. So as I want her enormously to like
him, we both hang, you see, on your lips ; unless
you call it, more correctly, on his."

Davey's evening bloom opened to them a dense
but perfectly pathless garden of possibilities ; out
of which, while he faced them, he left them to
pluck by their own act any bright flower they
sufficiently desired to reach. Wonderful during
the few instants, between these flagrant world-
lings, the exchange of fine recognitions. It would
have been hard perhaps to say of them whether
it was most discernible that Haughty and Cissy
trusted most his intelligence or his indifference,
and whether he most applauded or ignored the
high perfection of their assurance. What was
testified to all round, at all events — 1

" Ah then he is as ' odd ' as I was sure — in
spite of Haughty's perverse theory that we shall
find him the flattest of the flat ! "

1 There is a gap here in the MS. , with the following note by the author :
" It is the security of the two others with him that is testified to ; but I
mustn't make any sort of spread about it or about anything else here
now, and only put Davey on some non-committal reply to the question
addressed him, such as keeps up the mystery or ambiguity or suspense
about Gray, his moustache and everything else, so as to connect pro-
perly with what follows. The real point is — that comes back to me,
and it is in essence enough— that he pleads he doesn't remember, didn't
notice, at all ; and thereby oddly enough can't say. It will come to
me right once I get into it. One sees that Davey plays with them."

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It might have been at Haughty 's perverse theory
that Davey was most moved to stare — had he not
quickly betrayed, instead of this, a marked attention
to the girl herself. " Oh you little wonder and joy ! "

" She is a little wonder and joy," Horton said
— that at any rate came out clear.

" What you are, my boy, I'm not pretending to
say," Davey returned in answer to this ; " for I
don't accept her account of your vision of Gray
as throwing any light on it at all."

" On his judgment of Mr. Fielder, do you mean,"
Cissy earnestly asked, "or on your evidently
awful opinion of his own dark nature ? "

" Haughty knows that I lose myself in his dark
nature, at my spare moments, and with wind
enough on to whistle in that dark, very much as
if I had the fine excitement of the Foret de Bondy
to deal with. He's well aware that I know no
greater pleasure of the imagination than that
sort of interest in him — when I happen also to have
the time and the nerve. Let these things serve
me now, however, only to hurry you up," Davey
went on ; " and to say that I of course had with
our fortunate friend an impressive quarter of
an hour — which everyone will want to know about,
so that I must keep it till we sit down. But the
great thing is after all for yourself, Haughty,"
he added — " and you had better know at once
that he particularly wants to see you. He'll be

glad of you at the very first moment "

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But Horton had already taken him easily up.
" Of course I know, my dear man, that he par-
ticularly wants to see me. He has written me
nothing else from the moment he arrived."

" He has written you, you wretch," Cissy at
once extravagantly echoed — " he has written you
all sorts of things and you haven't so much as
told me ? "

" He hasn't written me all sorts of things "
Horton directed this answer to Davey alone—
" but has written me in such straight confidence
and friendship that I've been wondering if I mayn't
go round to him this evening."

" Gussy will no doubt excuse you for that pur-
pose with the utmost joy," Davey rejoined —
" though I don't think I advise you to ask her
leave if you don't want her at once to insist on
going with you. Go to him alone, very quietly
—and with the happy confidence of doing him
good."

It had been on Cissy that, for his part, Davey
had, in speaking, rested his eyes ; and it might
by the same token have been for the benefit of
universal nature, suspended to listen over the
bosom of the deep, that Horton's lips phrased his
frank reaction upon their entertainer's words.
" Well then, ye powers, the amount of good that
I shall undertake ! "

Davey Bradham and Cissy Foy exchanged on
the whole ground for a moment a considerable
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smile ; his share in which, however, it might
exactly have been that prompted the young
woman's further expression of their intelligence.
" It's too charming that he yearns so for Haughty
—and too sweet that Haughty can now rush to
him at once." To which she then appended in
another tone : " One takes for granted of course
that Rosanna was with him."

Davey at this but continued to bloom and beam ;
which gave Horton, even with a moment's delay,
time to assist his better understanding. " She
doesn't even yet embrace the fact, tremendously
as I've driven it into her, that if Rosanna had been
there he couldn't have breathed my name."

This made Davey, however, but throw up de-
risive hands ; though as with an impatient turn
now for their regaining the lawn. " My dear man,
Rosanna breathes your name with all the force
of her lungs ! "

Horton, jerking back his head for the bright
reassurance, laughed out with amusement. " What
a jolly cue then for my breathing of hers ! I'll roar
it to all the echoes, and everything will be well.
But what one's talking about," he said, " is the
question of Gray's naming me" He looked from
one of his friends to the other, and then, as
gathering them into the interest of it : " I'll bet
you a fiver that he doesn't at any rate speak to me
of Miss Gaw."

" Well, what will that prove ? " Davey asked,
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quite easy about it and leading the way up the
rocks.

" In the first place how much he thinks of her,"
said Cissy, who followed close behind. " And in
the second that it's ten to one Haughty will find
her there."

" I don't care if I do — not a scrap ! " Horton
also took his way. " I don't care for anything

now but the jolly fun, the jolly fun ! " He

had committed it all again, by the time they
reached the cliff's edge, to the bland participating
elements.

" Oh the treat the poor boy is evidently going
to stand us all ! " —well, was something that
Davey, rather out of breath as they reached the
lawn again and came in sight of the villa, had
just yet no more than those light words for. He
was more definite in remarking immediately after
to Cissy that Rosanna would be as little at the
other house that evening as she had been at the
moment of his own visit, and that, since the nurses
and other outsiders appeared to have dispersed,
there would be no one to interfere with Gray's
free welcome of his friend. The girl was so atten-
tive for this that it made them pause again while
she brought out in surprise : " There's nobody
else there, you mean then, to watch with the
dead ? "

It made Mr. Bradham for an instant wonder,
Horton, a little apart from them now and with

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his back turned, seeming at the same moment,
and whether or no her inquiry reached his ear,
struck with something that had pulled him up
as well and that made him stand and look down
in thought. " Why, I suppose the nephew must
be himself a sort of watcher," Davey found him-
self not other than decently vague to suggest.

But it scarce more contented Cissy than if the
point had really concerned her. She appeared
indeed to question the more, though her eyes
were on Haughty's rather brooding back while
she did so. " Then if he does stay in the room,
when he comes out of it to see people ? "

Her very drop seemed to present the state of
things to which the poor deceased was in that
case left ; for which, however, her good host de-
clined to be responsible. " I don't suppose he
comes out for so many."

" He came out at any rate for you." The sense
of it all rather remarkably held her, and it might
have been some communication of this that,
overtaking Horton at his slight distance, deter-
mined in him the impulse to leave them, without
more words, and walk by himself to the house.
" We don't surround such occasions with any
form or state of imagination — scarcely with any
decency, do we ? " Cissy adventured while observ-
ing Haughty's retreat. " I should like to think for
him of a catafalque and great draped hangings
—I should like to think for him of tall flambeaux

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in the darkened room, and of relays of watchers,
sisters of charity or suchlike, surrounding the
grand affair and counting their beads."

Davey's rich patience had a shrug. " The grand
affair, my dear child, is their affair, over there,
and not mine ; though when you indulge in such
fancies 'for him', I can't but wonder who it is
you mean."

" Who it is— - ? " She mightn't have under-
stood his difficulty.

" Why the dead man or the living ! "

They had gone on again ; Horton had, with a
quickened pace, disappeared ; and she had before
answering cast about over the fair face of the
great house, paler now in the ebb of day, yet with
dressing-time glimmers from upper windows flush-
ing it here and there like touches of pink paint in
an elegant evening complexion. " Oh I care
for the dead man, I'm afraid, only because it's
the living who appeals. I don't want him to like
it."

" To like ? " Davey was again at a loss.

" What on earth ? "

" Why all that ugliness and bareness, that
poverty of form."

He had nothing but derision for her here. " It
didn't occur to me at all to associate him with the
idea of poverty."

" The place must all the same be hideous," she
said, " and the conditions mean — for him to prowl

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about in alone. It comes to me," she further
risked, " that if Rosanna isn't there, as you say,
she quite ought to be — and that in her place I
should feel it no more than decent to go over and
sit with him."

This appeared to strike Davey in a splendid
number of lights — which, however, though col-
lectively dazzling, allowed discriminations. " It
perhaps bears a little on the point that she has
herself just sustained a grave bereavement — with
her offices to her own dead to think of first. That
was present to me in your talk a moment since
of Haughty 's finding her."

" Very true " — it was Cissy's practice, once
struck, ever amusedly to play with the missile :
" it is of course extraordinary that those bloated
old richards, at one time so associated, should have
flickered out almost at the same hour. What it
comes to then," she went on, " is that Mr. Gray
might be, or perhaps even ought to be, condoling
over at the other house with her. However, it's
their own business, and all I really care for is that
he should be so keen as you say about seeing
Haughty. I just delight," she said, " in his being
keen about Haughty."

" I'm glad it satisfies you then," Davey returned
— " for I was on the point of suggesting that with
the sense of his desolation you just expressed you
might judge your own place to be at once at his
side."

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" That would have been helpful of you — but
I'm content, dear Davey," she smiled. " We're
all devoted to Haughty — but," she added after
an instant, " there's just this. Did Mr. Graham
while you were there say by chance a word about
the likes of me ? "

"Well, really, no— our short talk didn't take
your direction. That would have been for me, I
confess," Davey frankly made bold to add, " a
trifle unexpected."

" I See " — Cissy did him the justice. " But
that's a little, I think, because you don't

know ! " It was more, however, than with

her sigh she could tell him.

" Don't know by this time, my dear, and after
all I've been through," he nevertheless supplied,
" what the American girl always so sublimely
takes for granted ? "

She looked at him on this with intensity — but
that of compassion rather than of the conscious
wound. " Dear old Davey, il n'y a que vous for
not knowing, by this time, as you say, that I've
notoriously nothing in common with the creature
you mention. I loathe," she said with her purest
gentleness, " the American girl."

He faced her an instant more as for a view of
the whole incongruity ; then he fetched, on his
side, a sigh which might have signified, at her
choice, either that he was wrong or that he was
finally bored. " Well, you do of course brilliantly

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misrepresent her. But we're all " — he hastened
to patch it up — " unspeakably corrupt."

" That would be a fine lookout for Mr. Fielder
if it were true/' she judiciously threw off.

" But as you're a judge you know it isn't ? "

" It's not as a judge I know it, but as a victim.
I don't say we don't do our best," she added ;
" but we're still of an innocence, an innocence — - ! "

''' Then perhaps," Davey offered, " Mr. Fielder
will help us; unless he proves, by your measure,
worse than ourselves ! "

" The worse he may be the better ; for it's not
possible, as I see him," she said, "that he doesn't
know."

" Know, you mean," Davey blandly wondered,
" how wrong we are — to be so right ? "

" Know more on every subject than all of us
put together ! " she called back at him as she
now hurried off to dress.

IV

HORTON VINT, on being admitted that evening
at the late Mr. Betterman's, walked about the room
to which he had been directed and awaited there
the friend of his younger time very much as we
have seen that friend himself wait under stress
of an extraordinary crisis. Horton's sense of a
crisis might have been almost equally sharp ;

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he was alone for some minutes during which he
shifted his place and circled, indulged in wide
vague movements and vacuous stares at incon-
gruous objects — the place being at once so spacious
and so thickly provided — quite after the fashion
in which Gray Fielder's nerves and imagination
had on the same general scene sought and found
relief at the hour of the finest suspense up to that
moment possessing him. Haughty too, it would
thus have appeared for the furtherance of our
interest, had imagination and nerves — had in
his way as much to reflect upon as we have allowed
ourselves to impute to the dying Mr. Better-man's
nephew. No one was dying now, all that was
ended, or would be after the funeral, and the
nephew himself was surely to be supposed alive,
in face of great sequels, including preparations
for those obsequies, with an intensity beyond
all former experience. This in fact Horton had
all the air of recognising under proof as soon as
Gray advanced upon him with both hands out ;
he couldn't not have taken in the highly quickened
state of the young black-clad figure so presented,
even though soon and unmistakably invited to
note that his own visit and his own presence had
much to do with the quickening. Gray was in
complete mourning, which had the effect of making
his face show pale, as compared with old aspects
of it remembered by his friend — who was, it may
be mentioned, afterwards to describe him to

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Cissy Foy as looking, in the conditions, these in-
cluding the air of the big bedimmed palace room,
for all the world like a sort of "happy Hamlet".
For so happy indeed our young man at once
proclaimed himself at sight of his visitor, for so
much the most interesting thing that had befallen
or been offered him within the week did he take,
by his immediate testimony, his reunion with this
character and every element of the latter's aspect
and tone, that the pitch of his acclamation clearly
had, with no small delay, to drop a little under
some unavoidable reminder that they met almost
in the nearest presence of death. Was the re-
minder Morton's own, some pull, for decorum,
of a longer face, some expression of his having
feared to act in undue haste on the message
brought him by Davey ? — which might have been,
we may say, in view of the appearance after a
little that it was Horton rather than Gray who
began to suggest a shyness, momentary, without
doubt, and determined by the very plenitude of
his friend's welcome, yet so far incongruous as
that it was not his adoption of a manner and
betrayal of a cheer that ran the risk of seeming
a trifle gross, but quite these indications on the
part of the fortunate heir of the old person await-
ing interment somewhere above. He could only
have seen with the lapse of the moments that
Gray was going to be simple — admirably, splen-
didly simple, one would probably have pronounced

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it, in estimating and comparing the various possible
dangers ; but the simplicity of subjects tre-
mendously educated, tremendously " cultivated "
and cosmopolitised, as Horton would have called
it, especially when such persons were naturally
rather extra-refined and ultra-perceptive, was a
different affair from the crude candour of the
common sort ; the consequence of which appre-
hensions and reflections must have been, in fine,
that he presently recognised in the product of
" exceptional advantages " now already more and
more revealed to him such a pliability of accent
as would easily keep judgment, or at least observa-
tion, suspended. Gray wasn't going to be at a loss
for any shade of decency that didn't depend, to
its inconvenience, on some uncertainty about a
guest's prejudice ; so that once the air was cleared
of awkwardness by that perception, exactly, in
Horton's ready mind that he and his traditions,
his susceptibilities, in fact (of all the queer
things !) his own very simplicities and, practi-
cally, stupidities were being superfluously allowed
for and deferred to, and that this, only this,
was the matter, he should have been able to
surrender without a reserve to the proposed
measure of their common rejoicing. Beautiful
might it have been to him to find his friend
so considerately glad of him that the spirit of
it could consort to the last point with any, with
every, other felt weight in the consciousness so

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attested ; in accordance with which we may
remark that continued embarrassment for our
gallant caller would have implied on his own side,
or in other words deep within his own spirit, some
obscure source of confusion.

What distinguishably happened was thus that
he first took Graham for exuberant and then for
repentant, with the reflection accompanying this
that he mustn't, to increase of subsequent shame,
have been too open an accomplice in mere jubila-
tion. Then the simple sense of his restored com-
rade's holding at his disposal a general confidence
in which they might absolutely breathe together
would have superseded everything else hadn't his
individual self-consciousness been perhaps a trifle
worried by the very pitch of so much openness.
Open, not less generously so, was what he could
himself have but wanted to be — in proof of which
we may conceive him insist to the happy utmost,
for promotion of his comfort, on those sides of their
relation the working of which would cast no shadow.
They had within five minutes got over much
ground — all of which, however, must be said to
have represented, and only in part, the extent of
Gray's requisition of what he called just elementary
human help. He was in a situation at which, as
he assured his friend, he had found himself able,
those several days, but blankly and inanely to
stare. He didn't suppose it had been his uncle's
definite design to make an idiot of him, but that

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seemed to threaten as Hje practical effect of the
dear man's extraordinary course. ' You see/'
he explained, bringing it almost pitifully out,
" he appears to have left me a most monstrous
fortune. I mean " — for under his appeal Haughty
had still waited a little — " a really tremendous
lot of money."

The effect of the tone of it was to determine
in Haughty a peal of laughter quickly repressed
— or reduced at least to the intention of decent
cheer. "He 'appears', my dear man? Do you
mean there's an ambiguity about his will ? "

Gray justified his claim of vagueness by having,
with his animated eyes on his visitor's, to take
an instant or two to grasp so technical an ex-
pression. " No — not an ambiguity. Mr. Crick
tells me that he has never in all his experience
seen such an amount of property disposed of in
terms so few and simple and clear. It would seem
a kind of masterpiece of a will."

1 ' Then what's the matter with it ? " Horton smiled.
" Or at least what's the matter with you ? — who are
so remarkably intelligent and clever ? "

" Oh no, I'm not the least little bit clever ! "
Gray in his earnestness quite excitedly protested.
" I haven't a single ray of the intelligence that
among you all here clearly passes for rudimentary.
But the luxury of you, Haughty," he broke out
on a still higher note, " the luxury, the pure luxury
of you ! "

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Something of beauty in the very tone of which,
some confounding force in the very clearness,
might it have been that made Horton himself
gape for a moment even as Gray had just de-
scribed his own wit as gaping. They had first
sat down, for hospitality offered and accepted
— though with no production of the smokable or
the drinkable to profane the general reference ;
but the agitation of all that was latent in this
itself had presently broken through, and by the
end of a few moments we might perhaps scarce
have been able to say whether the host had more
set the guest or the guest more the host in motion.
Horton Vint had everywhere so the air of a prime
social element that it took in any case, and above
all in any case of the spacious provision or the
sumptuous setting, a good deal of practically
combative proof to reduce the implications of his
presence to the minor right. He might inveterately
have been master or, in quantitative terms, owner
— so could he have been taken for the most part
as offering you the enjoyment of anything fine
that surrounded him : this in proportion to the
scale of such matters and to any glimpse of that
sense of them in you which was what came nearest
to putting you on his level. All of which sprang
doubtless but from the fact that his relation to
things of expensive interest was so much at the
mercy of his appearance ; representing as it might
be said to do a contradiction of the law under

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which it is mostly to be observed, in our modernest
conditions, that the figure least congruous with
scenic splendour is the figure awaiting the refer-
ence. More references than may here be detailed,
at any rate, would Horton have seemed ready to
gather up during the turns he had resumed his
indulgence in after the original arrest and the
measurements of the whole place practically
determined for him by Gray's own so suggestive
revolutions. It was positively now as if these
last had all met, in their imperfect expression,
what that young man's emotion was in the act
of more sharply attaining to — the plain conveyance
that if Horton had in his friendliness, not to say
his fidelity, presumed to care to know, this dis-
position was as naught beside the knowledge
apparently about to drench him. They were there,
the companions, in their second brief arrest, with
everything good in the world that he might have
conceived or coveted just taking for him the
radiant form of precious knowledges that he must
be so obliging as to submit to. Let it be fairly
inspiring to us to imagine the acuteness of his
perception during these minutes of the possibilities
of good involved ; the refinement of pleasure in
his seeing how the advantage thrust upon him
would wear the dignity and grace of his consenting
unselfishly to learn — inasmuch as, quite evidently,
the more he learnt, and though it should be osten-
sibly and exclusively about Mr. Betterman's heir,

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the more vividly it all would stare at him as a
marked course of his own. Wonderful thus the
little space of his feeling the great wave set in
motion by that quiet worthy break upon him
out of Gray's face, Gray's voice, Gray's contact
of hands laid all appealingly and affirmingly on his
shoulders, and then as it retreated, washing him
warmly down, expose to him, off in the intenser
light and the uncovered prospect, something like
his entire personal future. Something extra-
ordinarily like, yes, could he but keep steady to
recognise it through a deepening consciousness,
at the same time, of how he was more than match-
ing the growth of his friend's need of him by growing
there at once, and to rankness, under the friend's
nose, all the values to which this need supplied
a soil.

" Well, I 'won't pretend I'm not glad you don't
adopt me as pure ornament — glad you see, I mean,
a few connections in which one may perhaps be
able, as well as certainly desirous, to be of service
to you. Only one should honestly tell you/'
Horton went on, " that people wanting to help
you will spring up round you like mushrooms,
and that you'll be able to pick and choose as even
a king on his throne can't. Therefore, my boy,"
Haughty said, " don't exaggerate my modest
worth."

Gray, though releasing him, still looked at him
hard — so hard perhaps that, having imagination,

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he might in an instant more have felt it go down
too deep. It hadn't done that, however, when
' What I want of you above all is exactly that
you shall pick and choose " was merely what at
first came of it. And the case was still all of the
rightest as Graham at once added : ' You see
' people ' are exactly my difficulty — I'm so mortally
afraid of them, and so equally sure that it's the
last thing you are. If I want you for myself I
want you still more for others — by which you may
judge," said Gray, " that I've cut you out work."

" That you're mortally afraid of people is, I
confess," Haughty answered, " news to me. I
seem to remember you, on the contrary, as so
remarkably and — what was it we used to call it ?
— so critico-analytically interested in 'em."

" That's just it — I am so beastly interested !
Don't you therefore see/' Gray asked, " how I
may dread the complication ? "

" Dread it so that you seek to work it off on
another ? " — and Haughty looked about as if
he would after all have rather relished a cigarette.

Clearly, none the less, this awkwardness was
lost on his friend. " I want to work off on you,
Vinty, every blest thing that you'll let me ; and
when you've seen into my case a little further my
reasons will so jump at your eyes that I'm con-
vinced you'll have patience with them."

" I'm not then, you think, too beastly inter-
ested myself ? I've got such a free mind,

N 193

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you mean, and such a hard heart, and such a
record of failure to have been any use at all to
myself, that I must be just the person, it strikes
you, to save you all the trouble and secure you
all the enjoyment ? " That inquiry Horton
presently made, but with an addition ere Gray
could answer. " My difficulty for myself, you
see, has always been that I also am by my nature
too beastly interested."

" Yes " — Gray promptly met it — " but you
like it, take that easily, immensely enjoy it and
are not a bit afraid of it. You carry it off and you
don't pay for it."

" Don't you make anything," Horton simply
went on, " of my being for instance so uncannily
interested in yourself ? "

Gray's eyes again sounded him. " Are you
really and truly ? — to the extent of its not boring
you ? " But with all he had even at the worst
to take for granted he waited for no reassurance.
" You'll be so sorry for me that I shall wring your
heart and you'll assist me for common pity."

" Well," Horton returned, a natural gaiety of
response not wholly kept under, " how can I
absurdly make believe that pitying you, if it
conies to that, won't be enough against nature
to have some fascination ? Endowed with every
advantage, personal, physical, material, moral,
in other words, brilliantly clever, inordinately
rich, strikingly handsome and incredibly good,

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your state yet insists on being such as to nip in
the bud the hardy flower of envy. What's the
matter with you to bring that about would seem,
I quite agree, well worth one's looking into — even
if it proves, by its perversity or its folly, some-
thing of a trial to one's practical philosophy.
When I pressed you some minutes ago for the
reason of your not facing the future with a certain
ease you gave as that reason your want of edu-
cation and wit. But please understand," Horton
added, " that I've no time to waste with you on
sophistry that isn't so much as plausible." He
stopped a moment, his hands in his pockets, his
head thrown all but extravagantly back, so that
his considering look might have seemed for the time
to descend from a height designed a little to em-
phasise Gray's comparative want of stature. That
young man's own eyes remained the while, none
the less, unresentfully raised ; to such an effect
indeed that, after some duration of this exchange,
the bigger man's fine irony quite visibly shaded
into a still finer, and withal frankly kinder, curiosity.
Poor Gray, with a strained face and an agitation
but half controlled, breathed quick and hard, as
from inward pressure, and then, renouncing choice
—there were so many things to say — shook his
head, slowly and repeatedly, after a fashion that
discouraged levity. " My dear boy," said his
friend under this sharper impression, " you do
take it hard." Which made Graham turn away,

THE IVORY TOWER

move about in vagueness of impatience and, still
panting and still hesitating for other expression,
approach again, as from a blind impulse, the big
chimney-piece, reach for a box that raised a
presumption of cigarettes and, the next instant,
thrust it out in silence at his visitor. The latter's
welcome of the motion, his prompt appropriation
of relief, was also mute ; with which he found
matches in advance of Gray's own notice of them
and had a light ready, of which our young man
himself partook, before the box went back to its
shelf. Odd again might have been for a protected
witness of this scene — which of course is exactly
what you are invited to be — the lapse of speech
that marked it for the several minutes. Horton,
truly touched now, and to the finer issue we have
glanced at, waited unmistakably for the sign of
something more important than his imagination,
even at its best, could give him, and which, not
less conceivably, would be the sort of thing he
himself hadn't signs, either actual or possible, for.
He waited while they did the place at last the
inevitable small violence — this being long enough
to make him finally say : "Do you mean, on
your honour, that you don't like what has happened
to you ? "

This unloosed then for Gray the gate of possible
expression. " Of course I like it — that is of course
I try to. I've been trying here, day after day,
as hard as ever a decent man can have tried for

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anything ; and yet I remain, don't you see ? a
wretched little worm."

" Deary, deary me," stared Horton, " that you
should have to bring up your appreciation of it
from such depths ! You go in for it as you would
for the electric light or the telephone, and then
find half-way that you can't stand the expense
and want the next-door man somehow to combine
with you ? "

" That's exactly it, Vinty, and you're the next-
door man!"— Gray embraced the analogy with
glee. " I can't stand the expense, and yet I don't
for a moment deny I should immensely enjoy
the convenience. I want," he asseverated, " to
like my luck. I want to go in for it, as you say,
with every inch of any such capacity as I have.
And I want to believe in my capacity ; I want
to work it up and develop it — I assure you on my
honour I do. I've lashed myself up into feeling
that if I don't I shall be a base creature, a worm
of worms, as I say, and fit only to be utterly
ashamed. But that's where you come in. You'll
help me to develop. To develop my capacity I
mean," he explained with a wondrous candour.

Horton was now, small marvel, all clear faith ;
even, the cigarettes helping, to the verge again of
hilarity. " Your capacity — I see. Not so much
your property itself."

" WeU "—Gray considered of it—" what wiU
my property be except my capacity ? " He spoke

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really as for the pleasure of seeing very finely and
very far. " It won't if I don't like it, that is if I
don't understand it, don't you see ? enough to
make it count. Yes, yes, don't revile me," he
almost feverishly insisted : " I do want it to
count for all it's worth, and to get everything out
of it, to the very last drop of interest, pleasure,
experience, whatever you may call it, that such
a possession can yield. And I'm going to keep
myself up to it, to the top of the pitch, by every
art and prop, by every helpful dodge, that I can
put my hand on. You see if I don't. I breathe
defiance," he continued, with his rare radiance,
" at any suspicion or doubt. But I come back,"
he had to add, "to my point that it's you that I
essentially most depend on."

Horton again looked at him long and frankly ;
this subject of appeal might indeed for the moment
have been as embarrassed between the various
requisitions of response as Gray had just before
shown himself. But as the tide could surge for one
of the pair so it could surge for the other, and the
large truth of what Horton most grasped appeared
as soon as he had spoken. " The name of your
complaint, you poor dear delightful person, or
the name at least of your necessity, your predica-
ment and your solution, is marriage to a wife at
short order. I mean of course to an amiable one.
There, so obviously, is your aid and your prop,
there are the sources of success for interest in

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your fortune, and for the whole experience and
enjoyment of it, as you can't find them elsewhere.
What are you but just ' fixed ' to marry, and
what is the sense of your remarks but a more or
less intelligent clamour for it ? "

Triumphant indeed, as we have said, for lucidity
and ease, was this question, and yet it had filled
the air, for its moment, but to drop at once by
the practical puncture of Gray's perfect recog-
nition. " Oh of course I've thought of that —
but it doesn't meet my case at all." Had he been
capable of disappointment in his friend he might
almost have been showing it now.

Horton had, however, no heat about it. " You
mean you absolutely don't want a wife — in connec-
tion, so to speak, with your difficulties ; or with
the idea, that is, of their being resolved into
blessings ? "

" Well " — Gray was here at least all prompt
and clear — " I keep down, in that matter, so much
as I can any a priori or mere theoretic want. I
see my possibly marrying as an effect, I mean — I
somehow don't see it at all as a cause. A cause,
that is " — he easily worked it out — " of my getting
other things right. It may be, in conditions, the
greatest rightness of all ; but I want to be sure
of the conditions."

" The first of which is, I understand then "
for this at least had been too logical for Haughty
not to have to match it — " that you should fall so

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tremendously in love that you won't be able to
help yourself."

Graham just debated; he was all intelligence
here. " Falling tremendously in love — the way
you grands amour eux talk of such things ! "

" Where do you find, my boy," Horton asked,
" that I'm a grand amoureux? "

Well, Gray had but to consult his memory of
their young days together ; there was the ad-
mission, under pressure, that he might have con-
fused the appearances. " They were at any rate
always up and at you — which seems to have left
me with the impression that your life is full of
them."

" Every man's life is full of them that has a
door or a window they can come in by. But the
question's of yourself," said Haughty, " and just
exactly of the number of such that you'll have
to keep open or shut in the immense fagade you'll
now present."

Our young man might well have struck him
as before all else inconsequent. " I shall present
an immense fagade ? " — Gray, from his tone of
surprise, to call it nothing more, would have
thought of this for the first time.

But Horton just hesitated. " You've great
ideas if you see it yourself as a small one."

" I don't see it as any. I decline," Gray re-
marked, " to have a facade. And if I don't I shan't
have the windows and doors."

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' You've got 'em already, fifty in a row "
Haughty was remorseless — " and it isn't a question
of ' having ' : you are a fagade ; stretching a mile
right and left. How can you not be when I'm
walking up and down in front of you ? "

" Oh you walk up and down, you make the
things you pass, and you can behave of course if
you want like one of the giants in uniform, out-
side the big shops, who attend the ladies in and
out. In fact," Gray went on, "I don't in the
least judge that I am, or can be at all advertised
as, one of the really big. You seem all here
so hideously rich that I needn't fear to count
as extraordinary ; indeed I'm very competently
assured I'm by all your standards a very moderate
affair. And even if I were a much greater one "
— he gathered force — " my appearance of it would
depend only on myself. You can have means
and not be blatant ; you can take up, by the
very fact itself, if you happen to be decent, no
more room than may suit your taste. I'll be
hanged if I consent to take up an inch more than
suits mine. Even though not of the truly bloated
I've at least means to be quiet. Every one among
us — I mean among the moneyed — isn't a monster
on exhibition." In proof of which he abounded.
" I know people myself who aren't."

Horton considered him with amusement, as
well apparently as the people that he knew ! "Of
course you may dig the biggest hole in the ground

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THE IVORY TOWER

that ever was dug — spade-work comes high, but
you'll have the means — and get down into it and
sit at the very bottom. Only your hole will become
then the feature of the scene, and we shall crowd
a thousand deep all round the edge of it."

Gray stood for a moment looking down, then
faced his guest as with a slight effort. " Do you
know about Rosanna Gaw ? " And then while
Horton, for reasons of his own, failed at once to

answer : " She has come in for millions "

" Twenty- two and a fraction/' Haughty said
at once. " Do you mean that she sits, like Truth,
at the bottom of a well ? " he asked still more
divertedly.

Gray had a sharp gesture. " If there's a person

in the world whom I don't call a fagade ! "

" You don't call her one ? " — Haughty took
it right up. And he added as for very compassion :

" My poor man, my poor man ! "

" She loathes self-exhibition ; she loathes being
noticed ; she loathes every form of publicity."
Gray quite flushed for it.

Horton went to the mantel for another cigar-
ette, and there was that in the calm way of it
that made his friend, even though helping him
this time to a light, wait in silence for his word.
" She does more than that " — it was brought
quite dryly out. " She loathes every separate
dollar she possesses."

Gray's sense of the matter, strenuous though
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THE IVORY TOWER

it was, could just stare at this extravagance of
assent ; seeing however, on second thoughts,
what there might be in it. " Well then if what
I have is a molehill beside her mountain, I can
the more easily emulate her in standing back."

" What you have is a molehill ? " Horton was
concerned to inquire.

Gray showed a shade of guilt, but faced his
judge. " Well — so I gather."

The judge at this lost patience. " Am I to
understand that you positively cultivate vague-
ness and water it with your tears ? "

" Yes " — the culprit was at least honest — " I
should rather say I do. And I want you to let
me. Do let me."

" It's apparently more then than Miss Gaw
does ! "

" Yes " — Gray again considered ; " she seems
to know more or less what she's worth, and she
tells me that I can't even begin to approach it."

" Very crushing of her ! " his friend laughed.
" You ' make the pair ', as they say, and you must
help each other much. Her ' loathing ' it exactly
is — since we know all about it ! — that gives her
a frontage as wide as the Capitol at Washington.
Therefore your comparison proves little — though
I confess it would rather help us," Horton pur-
sued, " if you could seem, as you say, to have
asked one or two of the questions that I should
suppose would have been open to you."

203

THE IVORY TOWER

" Asked them of Mr. Crick, you mean ? "

" Well, yes — if you've nobody else, and as you
appear not to have been able to have cared to look
at the will yourself."

Something like a light of hope, at this, kindled
in Gray's face. " Would you care to look at it,
Vinty ? "

The inquiry gave Horton pause. " Look at it
now, you mean ? "

" Well — whenever you like. I think," said
Gray, " it must be in the house."

" You're not sure even of that ? " his companion
wailed.

" Oh I know there are two " — our young man
had coloured. " I don't mean different ones, but
copies of the same," he explained ; " one of which
Mr. Crick must have."

" And the other of which " — Horton pieced
it together — " is the one you offer to show me ? "

" Unless, unless ! " and Gray, casting

about, bethought himself. " Unless that one ! "

With his eyes on his friend's he still shamelessly
wondered.

" Unless that one has happened to get lost,"
Horton tenderly suggested, " so that you can't
after all produce it ? "

" No, but it may be upstairs, upstairs "

Gray continued to turn this over. " I think it
is," he then recognised, " where I had perhaps
better not just now disturb it."

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His recognition was nothing, apparently, how-
ever, to the clear quickness of Morton's. " It's
in your uncle's own room ? "

" The room," Gray assented, " where he lies
in death while we talk here." This, his tone sug-
gested, sufficiently enjoined delay.

Morton's concurrence was immediately such
that, once more turning off, he measured, for the
intensity of it, half the room. " I can't advise
you without the facts that you're unable to give,"
he said as he came back, " but I don't indeed
invite you to go and rummage in that presence."
He might have exhaled the faintest irony, save that
verily by this time, between these friends — by
which I mean of course as from one of them only,
the more generally assured, to the other — irony
would, to an at all exhaustive analysis, have been
felt to flicker in their medium. Gray might in
fact, on the evidence of his next words, have
found it just distinguishable.

" We do talk here while he lies in death " —
they had in fine all serenity for it. " But the
extraordinary thing is that my putting myself
this way at my ease — and for that matter putting
you at yours — is exactly what the dear man made
to me the greatest point of. I haven't the shade

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of a sense, and don't think I ever shall have, of
not doing what he wanted of me ; for what he
wanted of me," our particular friend continued,
" is — well, so utterly unconventional. He would
like my being the right sort of well-meaning idiot
that you catch me in the very fact of. I warned
him, I sincerely, passionately warned him, that
I'm not fit, in the smallest degree, for the use,
for the care, for even the most rudimentary com-
prehension, of a fortune ; and that exactly it was
which seemed most to settle him. He wanted
me clear, to the last degree, not only of the finan-
cial brain, but of any sort of faint germ of the
money-sense whatever — down to the very lack
of power, if he might be so happy (or if / might !)
to count up to ten on my fingers. Satisfied of the
limits of my arithmetic he passed away in bliss."

To this, as fairly lucid, Horton had applied
his understanding. ' You can't count up to
ten ? "

" Not all the way. Still," our young man
smiled, " the greater inspiration may now give me
the lift."

His guest looked as if one might by that time
almost have doubted. But it was indeed an extra-
ordinary matter. " How comes it then that your
want of arithmetic hasn't given you a want of
order ? — unless indeed I'm mistaken and you
were perhaps at sixes and sevens ? "

" Well, I think I was at sixes — though I never
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THE IVORY TOWER

got up to sevens ! I've never had the least rule
or method ; but that has been a sort of thing I
could more or less cover up — from others, I mean,
not from myself, who have always been help-
lessly ashamed of it. It hasn't been the disorder
of extravagance," Gray explained, " but the much
more ignoble kind, the wasteful thrift that doesn't
really save, that simply misses, and that neither
enjoys things themselves nor enjoys their horrid
little equivalent of hoarded pence. I haven't
needed to count far, the fingers of one hand serving
for my four or five possessions ; and also I've
kept straight not by taking no liberties with my
means, but by taking none with my understand-
ing of them. From fear of counting wrong, and
from loathing of the act of numerical calculation,
and of the humiliation of having to give it up
after so few steps from the start, I've never counted
at all — and that, you see, is what has saved me.
That has been my sort of disorder — which you'll
agree is the most pitiful of all."

Horton once more turned away from him, but
slowly this time, not in impatience, rather with
something of the preoccupation of a cup-bearer
whose bowl has been filled to the brim and who
must carry it a distance with a steady hand. So
for a minute or two might he have been taking
this care ; at the end of which, however, Gray
saw him stop in apparent admiration before a
tall inlaid and brass-bound French bahut ; with

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the effect, after a further moment, of a sharp break
of their thread of talk. " You've got some things
here at least to enjoy and that you ought to know
how to keep hold of ; though I don't so much
mean," he explained, " this expensive piece of
furniture as the object of interest perched on top."

" Oh the ivory tower ! — yes, isn't that, Vinty,
a prize piece and worthy of the lovely name ? "

Vinty remained for the time all admiration,
having, as you would easily have seen, lights
enough to judge by. " It appears to have been
your uncle's only treasure — as everything else
about you here is of a newness ! And it isn't so
much too small, Gray," he laughed, " for you
to get into it yourself, when you want to get rid
of us, and draw the doors to. If it's a symbol
of any retreat you really have an eye on I much
congratulate you ; I don't know what I wouldn't
give myself for the ' run ' of an ivory tower."

" Well, I can't ask you to share mine," Gray
returned ; " for the situation to have a sense, I
take it, one must sit in one's tower alone. And I
should properly say," he added after an hesita-
tion, " that mine is the one object, all round me
here, that I don't owe my uncle : it has been
placed at my disposition, in the handsomest way
in the world, by Rosanna Gaw."

" Ah that does increase the interest — even if
susceptible of seeming to mean, to one's bewilder-
ment, that it's the sort of thing she would like

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THE IVORY TOWER

to thrust you away into ; which I hope, however,
is far from the case. Does she then keep ivory
towers, a choice assortment ? " Horton quite
gaily continued ; "in the sense of having a row
of them ready for occupation, and with tenants
to match perchable in each and signalling along
the line from summit to summit ? Because "
and, facing about from his contemplation, he piled
up his image even as the type of object represented
by it might have risen in the air — " you give me
exactly, you see, the formula of that young lady
herself : perched aloft in an ivory tower is what
she is, and I'll be hanged if this isn't a hint to you
to mount, yourself, into just such another ; under
the same provocation, I fancy her pleading, as she
has in her own case taken for sufficient." Thus
it was that, suddenly more brilliant than ever yet,
to Graham's apprehension, you might well have
guessed, his friend stood nearer again — stood verily
quite irradiating responsive ingenuity. Markedly
would it have struck you that at such instants
as this, most of all, the general hush that was so
thick about them pushed upward and still further
upward the fine flower of the inferential. Follow-
ing the pair closely from the first, and beginning
perhaps with your idea that this life of the in-
telligence had its greatest fineness in Gray Fielder,
you would by now, I dare say, have been brought
to a more or less apprehensive foretaste of its possi-
bilities in our other odd agent. For how couldn't
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THE IVORY TOWER

it have been to the full stretch of his elastic im-
agination that Haughty was drawn out by the
time of his putting a certain matter beautifully
to his companion ? " Don't I, 'gad, take the thing
straight over from you — all of it you've been
trying to convey to me here ! — when I see you,
up in the blue, behind your parapet, just grace-
fully lean over and call down to where I mount
guard at your door in the dust and comparative
darkness ? It's well to understand " — his thumbs
now in his waistcoat-holes he measured his idea
as if Gray's own face fairly reflected it : " you
want me to take all the trouble for you simply,
in order that you may have all the fun. And
you want me at the same time, in order that things
shall be for you at their ideal of the easiest, to
make you believe, as a salve to your conscience,
that the fun isn't so mixed with the trouble as
that you can't have it, on the right arrangement
made with me, quite by itself. This is most in-
genious of you," Horton added, " but it doesn't
in the least show me, don't you see ? where my
fun comes in."

" I wonder if I can do that," Gray returned,
" without making you understand first something
of the nature of mine — or for that matter without
my first understanding myself perhaps what my
queer kind of it is most likely to be."

His companion showed withal for more and more
ready to risk amused recognitions. " You are

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THE IVORY TOWER

'rum.' with your queer kinds, and might make
my flesh creep, in these conditions, if it weren't
for something in me of rude pluck." Gray, in
speaking, had moved towards the great French
meuble with some design upon it or upon the
charge it carried ; which Morton's eyes just wonder-
ingly noted — and to the effect of an exaggeration
of tone in his next remark. " However, there are
assurances one doesn't keep repeating : it's so
little in me, I feel, to refuse you any service I'm
capable of, no matter how clumsily, that if you
take me but confidently enough for the agent
even of your unholiest pleasures, you'll find me
still putting them through for you when you've
broken down in horror yourself."

" Of course it's my idea that whatever I ask
you shall be of interest to you, and of the liveliest,
in itself — quite apart from any virtue of my con-
nection with it. If it speaks to you that way so
much the better," Gray went on, standing now
before the big bahut with both hands raised and
resting on the marble top. This lifted his face
almost to the level of the base of his perched
treasure — so that he stared at the ivory tower
without as yet touching it. He only continued to
talk, though with his thought, as he brought out
the rest of it, almost superseded by the new pre-
occupation. " I shall absolutely decline any good
of anything that isn't attended by some equivalent
or — what do you call it ? — proportionate good

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THE IVORY TOWER

for you. I shall propose to you a percentage, if
that's the right expression, on every blest benefit
I get from you in the way of the sense of safety."
Gray now moved his hands, laying them as
in finer fondness to either smoothly-plated side
of the tall repository, against which a finger or two
caressingly rubbed. His back turned therefore
to Horton, he was divided between the growth
of his response to him and that of this more sensible
beauty. " Don't I kind of insure my life, my
moral consciousness, I mean, for your advantage ?
— or with you, as it were, taking you for the office-
man or actuary, if I'm not muddling : to whom
I pay a handsome premium for the certainty of
there being to my credit, on my demise, a sufficient
sum to clear off my debts and bury me."

' You propose to me a handsome premium ?
Catch me," Horton laughed, " not jumping at
that \ "

' Yes, and you'll of course fix the premium
yourself." But Gray was now quite detached,
occupied only in opening his ivory doors with
light fingers and then playing these a little, whether
for hesitation or for the intenser pointing of in-
quiry, up and down the row of drawers so exposed.
Against the topmost they then rested a moment
— drawing out this one, however, with scant
further delay and enabling themselves to feel
within and so become possessed of an article con-
tained. It was with this article in his hand that

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THE IVORY TOWER

he presently faced about again, turning it over,
resting his eyes on it and then raising them to
his visitor, who perceived in it a heavy letter,
duly addressed, to all appearance, but not stamped
and as yet unopened. " The distinguished retreat,
you see, has its tenant."

" Do you mean by its tenant the author of
those evidently numerous pages? — unless you
rather mean," Horton asked, " that you seal up
in packets the love-letters addressed to you and
find that charming receptacle a congruous place
to keep them ? Is there a packet in every drawer,
and do you take them out this way to remind
yourself fondly that you have them and that it
mayn't be amiss for me to feel your conquests
and their fine old fragrance dangled under my
nose ? "

Our young man, at these words, had but re-
turned to the consideration of his odd property,
attaching it first again to the superscription and
then to the large firm seal. " I haven't the least
idea what this is ; and I'm divided in respect of
it, I don't mind telling you, between curiosity
and repulsion."

Horton then also eyed the ambiguity, but at
his discreet distance and reaching out for it as
little as his friend surrendered it. " Do you appeal
to me by chance to help you to decide either way ? "

Poor Gray, still wondering and fingering, had
a long demur. " No — I don't think I want to

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decide." With which he again faced criticism.
" The extent, Vinty, to which I think I must just
like to drift ! "

Vinty seemed for a moment to give this indicated
quantity the attention invited to it, but without
more action for the case than was represented by
his next saying : " Why then do you produce your
question — apparently so much for my benefit ? "

" Because in the first place you noticed the
place it lurks in, and because in the second I like
to tell you things."

This might have struck us as making the strained
note in Vinty's smile more marked. " But that's
exactly, confound you, what you don't do ! Here
have I been with you half an hour without your
practically telling me anything ! "

Graham, very serious, stood a minute looking
at him hard ; succeeding also quite it would seem
in taking his words not in the least for a reproach
but for a piece of information of the greatest
relevance, and thus at once dismissing any minor
importance. He turned back with his minor
importance to his small open drawer, laid it within
again and, pushing the drawer to, closed the doors
of the cabinet. The act disposed of the letter,
but had the air of introducing as definite a state-
ment as Horton could have dreamt of. " It's a
bequest from Mr. Gaw."

"A bequest " —Horton wondered — "of bank-
notes ? "

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" No — it's a letter addressed to me just before
his death, handed me by his daughter, to whom
he intrusted it, and not likely, I think, to contain
money. He was then sure, apparently, of my
coming in for money ; and even if he hadn't been
would have had no ground on earth for leaving
me anything."

Horton's visible interest was yet consonant
with its waiting a little for expression. " He
leaves you the great Rosanna."

Graham, at this, had a stare, followed by a flush
as the largest possible sense of it came out. ' You

suppose it perhaps the expression of a wish ? "

And then as Horton forebore at first as to what
he supposed : "A wish that I may find confidence
to apply to his daughter for her hand ? "

" That hasn't occurred to you before ? " Horton
asked — " nor the measure of the confidence sug-
gested been given you by the fact of your receiving
the document from Rosanna herself ? You do
give me, you extraordinary person," he gaily
proceeded, " as good opportunities as I could
possibly desire to ' help ' you ! "

Graham, for all the felicity of this, needed but
an instant to think. " I have it from Miss Gaw
herself that she hasn't an idea of what the letter
contains — any more than she has the least desire
that I shall for the present open it."

" Well, mayn't that very attitude in her rather
point to a suspicion ? " was his guest's ingenious

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THE IVORY TOWER

reply. " Nothing could be less like her certainly
than to appear in such a case to want to force
your hand. It makes her position — with exquisite
filial piety, you see — extraordinarily delicate."

Prompt as that might be, Gray appeared to
show, no sportive sophistry, however charming,
could work upon him. " Why should Mr. Gaw
want me to marry his daughter ? "

Horton again hung about a little. " Why
should you be so afraid of ascertaining his idea
that you don't so much as peep into what he
writes on the subject ? "

" Afraid ? Am I afraid ? " Gray fairly spoke
with a shade of the hopeful, as if even that would
be richer somehow than drifting.

" Well, you looked at your affair just now as you
might at some small dangerous, some biting or
scratching, animal whom you're not at all sure
of."

" And yet you see I keep him about."

' Yes — you keep him in his cage, for which I
suppose you have a key."

" I have indeed a key, a charming little golden
key." With which Gray took another turn ; once
more facing criticism, however, to say with force :
" He hated him most awfully ! "

Horton appeared to wonder. " Your uncle
hated old Gaw ? "

" No — I don't think he cared. I speak of Mr.
Gaw's own animus. He disliked so mortally his

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THE IVORY TOWER

old associate, the man who lies dead upstairs —
and in spite of my consideration for him I still
preserve his record."

" How do you know about his hate," Horton
asked, "or if your letter, since you haven't read
it, is a record ? "

" Well, I don't trust it— I mean not to be. I
don't see what else he could have written me
about. Besides," Gray added, " I've my per-
sonal impression."

" Of old Gaw ? You had seen him then ? "

" I saw him out there on this verandah, where
he was hovering in the most extraordinary fashion,
a few hours before his death. It was only for a
few minutes," Gray said — " but they were minutes
I shall never forget."

Horton's interest, though so deeply engaged,
was not unattended with perplexity. " You
mean he expressed to you such a feeling at such
an hour ? "

" He expressed to me in about three minutes,
without speech, to which it seemed he couldn't
trust himself, as much as it might have taken
him, or taken anyone else, to express in three
months at another time and on another subject.
If you ever yourself saw him," Gray went on,
" perhaps you'll understand."

" Oh I often saw him — and should indeed in
your place perhaps have understood. I never
heard him accused of not making people do so.

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THE IVORY TOWER

But you hold/' said Horton, " that he must have
backed up for you further the mystic revelation ? "

" He had written before he saw me — written
on the chance of my being a person to be affected
by it ; and after seeing me he didn't destroy or
keep back his message, but emphasised his wish
for a punctual delivery."

" By which it is evident," Horton concluded,
" that you struck him exactly as such a person."

" He saw me, by my idea, as giving my atten-
tion to what he had there ready for me." Gray
clearly had talked himself into possession of his
case. " That's the sort of person I succeeded in
seeming to him — though I can assure you without
my the least wanting to."

" What you feel is then that he thought he
might attack with some sort of shock for you the
character of your uncle ? " Vinty's question had
a special straight ness.

" What I feel is that he has so attacked it,
shock or no shock, and that that thing in my
cabinet, which I haven't examined, can only be the
proof."

It gave Horton much to turn over. " But your
conviction has an extraordinary bearing. Do I
understand that the thing was handed you by your
friend with a knowledge of its contents ? "

" Don't, please," Gray said at once, " under-
stand anything either so hideous or so impossible.
She but carried out a wish uttered on her father's

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THE IVORY TOWER

deathbed, and hasn't so much as suggested that
I break the portentous seal. I think in fact,"
he assured himself, " that she greatly prefers I
shouldn't."

"Which fact," Horton observed, "but adds
of course to your curiosity."

Gray's look at him betrayed on this a still finer
interest in his interest. " You see the limits in
me of that passion."

" Well, my dear chap, I've seen greater limits
to many things than your having your little secret
tucked away under your thumb. Do you mind
my asking," Horton risked, " whether what deters
you from action — and by action I mean opening
your letter — is just a real apprehension of the
effect designed by the good gentleman ? Do you
feel yourself exposed, by the nature of your mind
or any presumption on Gaw's behalf, to give credit,
vulgarly speaking, to whatever charge or charges
he may bring ? "

Gray weighed the question, his wide dark eyes
would have told us, in his choicest silver scales.
" Neither the nature of my mind, bless it, nor the
utmost force of any presumption to the contrary,
prevents my having found my uncle, in his wonder-
ful latest development, the very most charming
person that I've ever seen in my life. Why he
impressed me as a model of every virtue."

" I confess I don't see," said Horton, " how a
relative so behaving could have failed to endear

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THE IVORY TOWER

himself. With such convictions why don't you
risk looking ? "

Gray was but for a moment at a loss — he quite
undertook to know. " Because the whole thing
would be so horrible. I mean the question itself
is — and even our here and at such a time dis-
cussing it."

" Nothing is horrible — to the point of making
one quake," Horton opined, " that falls to the
ground with a smash from the moment one drops
it. The sense of your document is exactly what's
to be appreciated. It would have no sense at all
if you didn't believe."

Gray considered, but still differed. " Yes, to
find it merely vindictive and base, and thereby
to have to take it for false, that would still be
an odious experience."

" Then why the devil don't you simply destroy
the thing ? " Horton at last quite impatiently
inquired.

Gray showed perhaps he had scarce a reason,
but had, to the very brightest effect, an answer.
" That's just what I want you to help me to. To
help me, that is," he explained, " after a little to
decide for."

" After a little ? " wondered Horton. " After
how long ? "

" Well, after long enough for me to feel sure
I don't act in fear. I don't want," he went on
as in fresh illustration of the pleasure taken by

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THE IVORY TOWER

him, to the point, as it were, of luxury, in feeling
no limit to his companion's comprehension, or
to the patience involved in it either, amusedly
as Horton might at moments attempt to belie
that, adding thereby to the whole service some-
thing still more spacious — " I don't want to act
in fear of anything or of anyone whatever ; I
said to myself at home three weeks ago, or when-
ever, that it wasn't for that I was going to come
over ; and I propose therefore, you see, to know
so far as possible where I am and what I'm about :
morally speaking at least, if not financially."

His friend but looked at him again on this in
rather desperate diversion. " I don't see how
you're to know where you are, I confess, if you
take no means to find out."

" Well, my acquisition of property seems by
itself to promise me information, and for the
understanding of the lesson I shall have to take
a certain time. What I want," Gray finely
argued, " is to act but in the light of that."

" In the light of time ? Then why do you begin
by so oddly wasting it ? "

" Because I think it may be the only way for
me not to waste understanding. Don't be afraid,"
he went on, moving as by the effect of Horton's
motion, which had brought that subject of appeal
a few steps nearer the rare repository, " that I
shall commit the extravagance of at all wasting
you:'

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THE IVORY TOWER

Horton, from where he had paused, looked up
at the ivory tower ; though as Gray was placed
in the straight course of approach to it he had
after a fashion to catch and meet his eyes by the
way. " What you really want of me, it's clear,
is to help you to fidget and fumble — or in other
words to prolong the most absurd situation ;
and what I ought to do, if you'd believe it of me,
is to take that stuff out of your hands and just
deal with it myself."

" And what do you mean by dealing with it
yourself ? "

" Why destroying it unread by either of us—
which," said Horton, looking about, "I'd do in
a jiffy, on the spot, if there were only a fire in
that grate. The place is clear, however, and we've
matches ; let me chuck your letter in and enjoy
the blaze with you."

" Ah, my dear man, don't ! Don't ! " Gray
repeated, putting it rather as a plea for indulgence
than as any ghost of a defiance, but instinctively
stepping backward in defence of his treasure.

His companion, for a little, gazed at the cabinet,
in speculation, it might really have seemed, as
to an extraordinary reach of arm. " You posi-
tively prefer to hug the beastly thing ? "

" Let me alone," Gray presently returned, " and
you'll probably find I've hugged it to death."

Horton took, however, on his side, a moment
for further reflection. " I thought what you

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THE IVORY TOWER

wanted of me to be exactly not that I should let
you alone, but that I should give you on the con-
trary my very best attention."

"Well," Gray found felicity to answer, "I
feel that you'll see how your very best attention
will sometimes consist in your not at all minding
me."

So then for the minute Horton looked as if he
took it. The great clock on the mantel appeared
to have stopped with the stop of its late owner's
life ; so that he eyed his watch and startled at
the hour to which they had talked. He put out
his hand for good-night, and this returned grasp
held them together in silence a minute. Some-
thing then in his sense of the situation determined
his breaking out with an intensity not yet produced
in him. " Yes — you're really prodigious. I mean
for trust in a fellow. For upon my honour you
know nothing whatever about me."

" That's quite what I mean," said Gray — " that
I suffer from my ignorance of so much that's im-
portant, and want naturally to correct it."
' Naturally ' ? " his visitor gloomed.

' Why, I do know Ms about you, that when
we were together with old Roulet at Neuchatel
and, off on our cours that summer, had strayed
into a high place, in the Oberland, where I was
ass enough to have slid down to a scrap of a dizzy
ledge, and so hung helpless over the void, unable
to get back, in horror of staying and in greater

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THE IVORY TOWER

horror of not, you got near enough to me, at the
risk of your life, to lower to me the rope we so
luckily had with us and that made an effort of my
own possible by my managing to pass it under
my arms. You helped that effort from a place
of vantage above that nobody but you, in your
capacity for playing up, would for a moment have
taken for one, and you so hauled and steadied
and supported me, in spite of your almost equal
exposure, that little by little I climbed, I scrambled,
my absolute confidence in you helping, for it
amounted to inspiration, and got near to where
you were."

" From which point," said Horton, whom this
reminiscence had kept gravely attentive, " you
in your turn rendered me such assistance, I re-
member, though I can't for the life of me imagine
how you contrived, that the tables were quite
turned and I shouldn't in the least have got out
of my fix without you." He now pulled up short
however ; he stood a moment looking down. " It
isn't pleasant to remember."

" It wouldn't," Gray judged, " be pleasant to
forget. You gave proof of extraordinary coolness."

Horton still had his eyes on the ground. " We
both kept our heads. I grant it's a decent note
for us."

" If you mean we were associated in keeping
our heads, you kept mine," Gray remarked, " much
more than I kept yours. I should be without a

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THE IVORY TOWER

head to-day if you hadn't seen so to my future, just
as I should be without a heart, you must really
let me remark, if I didn't look now to your past.
I consider that to know that fact in it takes me
of itself well-nigh far enough in appreciation of
you for my curiosity, even at its most exasperated,
to rest on a bed of roses. However, my imagina-
tion itself," Gray still more beautifully went on,
" insists on making additions — since how can't
it, for that matter, picture again the rate at which
it made them then ? I hadn't even at the time
waited for you to save my life in order to think
you a swell. If I thought you the biggest kind
of one, and if in your presence now I see just as
much as ever why I did, what does that amount
to but that my mind isn't a blank about you ? "

" Well, if mine had ever been one about you,"
said Horton, once more facing it, " our so inter-
esting conversation here would have sufficed to
cram it full. The least I can make of you, whether
for your protection or my profit, is just that you're
insanely romantic."

" Romantic — yes," Gray smiled ; " but oh,
but oh, so systematically ! "

" It's your system that's exactly your mad-
ness. How can you take me, without a stroke of
success, without a single fact of performance, to
my credit, for anything but an abject failure ?
You're in possession of no faintest sign, kindly
note, that I'm not a mere impudent ass."
p 225

THE IVORY TOWER

Gray accepted this reminder, for all he showed
to the contrary, in the admiring spirit in which he
might have regarded a splendid somersault or
an elegant trick with cards ; indulging, that is,
by his appearance, in the forward bend of atten-
tion to it, but then falling back to more serious
ground. " It's my romance that's itself my reason ;
by which I mean that I'm never so reasonable,
so deliberate, so lucid and so capable — to call
myself capable at any hour ! — as when I'm most
romantic. I'm methodically and consistently so,
and nothing could make and keep me, for any
dealings with me, I hold, more conveniently safe
and quiet. You see that you can lead me about
by a string if you'll only tie it to my appropriate
finger — which you'll find out, if you don't mind
the trouble, by experience of the wrong ones,
those where the attachment won't ' act '." He
drew breath to give his friend the benefit of this
illustration, but another connection quickly caught
him up. " How can you pretend to suggest that
you're in these parts the faintest approach to an
insignificant person ? How can you pretend that
you're not as clever as you can stick together,
and with the cleverness of the right kind ? For
there are odious kinds, I know — the kind that
redresses other people's stupidity instead of sitting
upon it."

"I'll answer you those questions," Horton
goodhumouredly said, " as soon as you tell me

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THE IVORY TOWER

how you've come by your wonderful ground for
them. Till you're able to do that I shall resent
your torrent of abuse. The appalling creature
you appear to wish to depict ! "

" Well, you're simply a figure — what I call —
in all the force of the term ; one has only to look
at you to see it, and I shall give up drawing con-
clusions from it only when I give up looking. You
can make out that there's nothing in a prejudice,"
Gray developed, " for a prejudice may be, or must
be, so to speak, single-handed; but you can't not
count with a relation — I mean one you're a party
to, because a relation is exactly a fact of reciprocity.
Our reciprocity, which exists and which makes
me a party to it by existing for my benefit, just
as it makes you one by existing for yours, can't
possibly result in your not ' figuring ' to me, don't
you see ? with the most admirable intensity.
And I simply decline," our young man wound
up, " not to believe tremendous things of any
subject of a relation of mine."

" ' Any ' subject ? " Vinty echoed in a tone that
showed how intelligently he had followed. " That
condition, I'm afraid," he smiled, " will cut down
not a little your general possibilities of relation."
And then as if this were cheap talk, but a point
none the less remained : "In this country one's a
figure (whatever you may mean by that !) on easy
terms ; and if I correspond to your idea of the
phenomenon you'll have much to do — I won't say

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THE IVORY TOWER

for my simple self, but for the comfort of your
mind — to make your fond imagination fit the
funny facts. You pronounce me an awful swell
— which, like everything else over here, has less
weight of sense in it for the saying than it could
have anywhere else ; but what barest evidence
have you of any positive trust in me shown on
any occasion or in any connection by one creature
you can name ? "

" Trust ? "—Gray looked at the red tip of the
cigarette between his fingers.

" Trust, trust, trust ! "

Well, it didn't take long to say. " What do
you call it but trust that such people as the Brad-
hams, and all the people here, as he tells me, receive
you with open arms ? "

" Such people as the Bradhams and as ' all the
people here ' ! " — Horton beamed on him for the
beauty of that. " Such authorities and such
' figures/ such allegations, such perfections and
such proofs ! Oh," he said, " I'm going to have
great larks with you ! "

" You give me then the evidence I want in
the very act of challenging me for it. What better
proof of your situation and your character than
your possession exactly of such a field for what-
ever you like, of such a dish for serving me up ?
Mr. Bradham, as you know," Gray continued,
" was this morning so good as to pay me a visit,
and the form in which he put your glory to me

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— because we talked of you ever so pleasantly —
was that, by his appreciation, you know your
way about the place better than all the rest of
the knowing put together."

Horton smiled, smoked, kept his hands in his
pockets. " Dear deep old Davey ! "

' Yes," said Gray consistently, " isn't he a wise
old specimen ? It's rather horrid for me having
thus to mention, as if you had applied to me for
a place, that I've picked up a good ' character '
of you, but since you insist on it he assured me
that I couldn't possibly have a better friend."

" Well, he's a most unscrupulous old person
and ought really to be ashamed. What it comes
to," Haughty added, " is that though I've re-
peatedly stayed with them they've to the best
of his belief never missed one of the spoons. The
fact is that even if they had poor Davey wouldn't
know it."

" He doesn't take care of the spoons ? " Gray
asked in a tone that made his friend at once swing
round and away. He appeared to note an un-
expectedness in this, yet, " out " as he was for
unexpectedness, it could grow, on the whole, clearly,
but to the raising of his spirits. " Well, I shall
take care of my loose valuables and, unwarned
by the Bradhams and likely to have such things
to all appearance in greater number than ever
before, what can I do but persist in my notion of
asking you to keep with me, at your convenience,

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some proper count of them? " After which as
Horton's movement had carried him quite to the
far end of the room, where the force of it even
detained him a little, Gray had him again well in
view for his return, and was prompted thereby
to a larger form of pressure. " How can you pre-
tend to palm off on me that women mustn't in
prodigious numbers ' trust ' you ? "

Haughty made of his shoulders the most pro-
digious hunch. " What importance, under the sun,
has the trust of women — in numbers however
prodigious ? It's never what's best in a man
they trust — it's exactly what's worst, what's most
irrelevant to anything or to any class but them-
selves. Their kind of confidence," he further
elucidated, " is concerned only with the effect
of their own operations or with those to which they
are subject ; it has no light either for a man's
other friends or for his enemies : it proves nothing
about him but in that particular and wholly
detached relation. So neither hate me nor like
me, please, for anything any woman may tell
you."

Horton's hand had on this renewed and empha-
sised its proposal of good-night ; to which his
host acceded with the remark : " What superfluous
precautions you take ! "

" How can you call them superfluous," he asked
in answer to this, " when you've been taking them
at such a rate yourself ? — in the interest, I mean,

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of trying to persuade me that you can't stand on
your feet ? "

" It hasn't been to show you that I'm silly about
life — which is what you've just been talking of.
It has only been to show you that I'm silly about
affairs," Gray said as they went at last through
the big bedimmed hall to the house doors, which
stood open to the warm summer night under the
protection of the sufficient outward reaches.

"Well, what are affairs but life?" Vinty, at
the top of the steps, sought to know.

' You'll make me feel, no doubt, how much
they are — which would be very good for me. Only
life isn't affairs — that's my subtle distinction,"
Gray went on.

"I'm not sure, I'm not sure ! " said Horton
while he looked at the stars.

" Oh rot — / am ! " Gray happily declared ;
to which he the next moment added : " What it
makes you contend for, you see, is the fact of my
silliness."

"Well, what is that but the most splendid fact
about you, you jolly old sage?" — and his visitor,
getting off, fairly sprang into the shade of the
shrubberies.

23'

BOOK FOURTH

AGAIN and again, during the fortnight that followed
his uncle's death, were his present and his future
to strike our young man as an extraordinary blank
cheque signed by Mr. Betterman and which, from
the moment he accepted it at all, he must fill out,
according to his judgment, his courage and his
faith, with figures, monstrous, fantastic, almost
cabalistic, that it seemed to him he should never
learn to believe in. It was not so much the wonder
of there being in various New York institutions
strange deposits of money, to amounts that, like
familiar mountain masses, appeared to begin at
the blue horizon and, sloping up and up toward
him, grew bigger and bigger the nearer he or they
got, till they fairly overhung him with their purple
power to meet whatever drafts upon them he
should make ; it was not the tone, the climax of
dryness, of that dryest of men Mr. Crick, whose
answering remark as to any and every particular
presumption of credit was " Well, I guess I've

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fixed it so as you'll find something there " ; that
sort of thing was of course fairytale enough in
itself, was all the while and in a hundred connec-
tions a sweet assault on his credulity, but was at
the same time a phase of experience comparatively
vulgar and that tended to lose its edge with re-
petition. The real, the overwhelming sense of
his adventure was much less in the fact that he
could lisp in dollars, as it were, and see the dollars
come, than in those vast vague quantities, those
spreading tracts, of his own consciousness itself
on which his kinsman's prodigious perversity had
imposed, as for his exploration, the aspect of a
boundless capital. This trust of the dead man
in his having a nature that would show to advan-
tage under a bigger strain than it had ever dreamed
of meeting, and the corresponding desolate freedom
on his own part to read back into the mystery
such refinements either, or such crude candours,
of meaning and motive as might seem best to fit
it, that was the huge vague inscribable sum which
ran up into the millions and for which the signa-
ture that lettered itself to the last neatness wherever
his mind's eye rested was " good " enough to
reduce any more casual sign in the scheme of
nature or of art to the state of a negligible blur.
Mr. Crick's want of colour, as Gray qualified this
gentleman's idiosyncrasy from the moment he saw
how it would be their one point of contact, became,
by the extreme rarity and clarity with which it

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couldn't but affect him, the very most gorgeous gem,
of the ruby or topaz order, that the smooth forehead
of the actual was for the present to flash upon him.

For dry did it appear inevitable to take the fact
of a person's turning up, from New York, with no
other retinue than an attendant scribe in a straw
hat, a few hours before his uncle's last one, and
being beholden to mere Miss Mumby for simple
introduction to Gray as Mr. Betterman's lawyer.
So had such sparenesses and barenesses of form to
register themselves for a mind beset with the
tradition that consequences were always somehow
voluminous things ; and yet the dryness was of a
sort, Gray soon apprehended, that he might take up
in handfuls, as if it had been the very sand of the
Sahara, and thereby find in it, at the least exposure
to light, the collective shimmer of myriads of fine
particles. It was with the substance of the desert
taken as monotonously sparkling under any motion
to dig in it that the abyss of Mr. Crick's functional
efficiency was filled. That efficiency, in respect
to the things to be done, would clearly so answer
to any demand upon it within the compass of our
young man's subtlety, that the result for him
could only be a couple of days of inexpressible
hesitation as to the outward air he himself should
be best advised to aim at wearing. He reminded
himself at this crisis of the proprietor of a garden,
newly acquired, who might walk about with his
gardener and try to combine, in presence of

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abounding plants and the vast range of luxuriant
nature, an ascertainment of names and pro-
perties and processes with a dissimulation, for
decent appearance, of the positive side of his
cockneyism. By no imagination of a state of mind
so unfurnished would the gardener ever have
been visited ; such gaping seams in the garment
of knowledge must affect him at the worst as mere
proprietary languor, the offhandness of repletion ;
and no effective circumvention of traditional
takings for granted could late-born curiosity there-
fore achieve. Gray's hesitation ceased only when
he had decided that he needn't care, comparatively
speaking, for what Mr. Crick might think of him.
He was going to care for what others might —
this at least he seemed restlessly to apprehend ;
he was going to care tremendously, he felt him-
self make out, for what Rosanna Gaw might, for
what Horton Vint might — even, it struck him,
for what Davey Bradham might. But in presence
of Mr. Crick, who insisted on having no more
personal identity than the omnibus conductor
stopping before you but just long enough to bite
into a piece of pasteboard with a pair of small steel
jaws, the question of his having a character either
to keep or to lose declined all relevance — and for
the reason in especial that whichever way it might
turn for him would remain perhaps, so to speak,
the most unexpressed thing that should ever have
happened in the world.

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The effect producible by him on the persons
just named, and extending possibly to whole
groups of which these were members, would be
an effect because somehow expressed and en-
countered as expression : when had he in all his
life, for example, so lived in the air of expression
and so depended on the help of it, as in that so
thrilling night-hour just spent with the mystify-
ing and apparently mystified, yet also apparently
attached and, with whatever else, attaching,
Vinty ? It wasn't that Mr. Crick, whose analogue
he had met on every, occasion of his paying his
fare in the public conveyances — where the persons
to whom he paid it, without perhaps in their par-
ticulars resembling each other, all managed never-
theless to be felt as gathered into this reference —
wasn't in a high degree conversible ; it was that
the more he conversed the less Gray found out
what he thought not only of Mr. Betterman's heir
but of any other subject on which they touched.
The gentleman who would, by Gray's imagina-
tion, have been acting for the executors of his
uncle's will had not that precious document
appeared to dispense with every superfluity, could
state a fact, under any rash invitation, and endow
it, as a fact, with the greatest conceivable ampli-
tude— this too moreover not because he was
garrulous or gossiping, but because those facts
with which he was acquainted, the only ones on
which you would have dreamed of appealing to

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him, seemed all perfect nests or bags of other
facts, bristling or bulging thus with every inten-
sity of the positive and leaving no room in their
interstices for mere appreciation to so much as
turn round. They were themselves appreciation
— they became so by the simple force of their
existing for Mr. Crick's arid mention, and they
so covered the ground of his consciousness to the
remotest edge that no breath of the air either of
his own mind or of anyone's else could have pre-
tended to circulate about them. Gray made the
reflection — tending as he now felt himself to waste
rather more than less time in this idle trick —
that the different matters of content in some mis-
understandings have so glued themselves together
that separation has quite broken down and one
continuous block, suggestive of dimensional
squareness, with mechanical perforations and other
aids to use subsequently introduced, comes to
represent the whole life of the subject. What it
amounted to, he might have gathered, was that
Mr. Crick was of such a common commonness
as he had never up to now seen so efficiently
embodied, so completely organised, so securely
and protectedly active, in a word — not to say so
garnished and adorned with strange refinements
of its own : he had somehow been used to thinking
of the extreme of that quality as a note of de-
feated application, just as the extreme of rarity
would have to be. His domestic companion of

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these days again and again struck him as most
touching the point at issue, and that point alone,
when most proclaiming at every pore that there
wasn't a difference, in all the world, between one
thing and another. The refusal of his whole person
to figure as a fact invidiously distinguishable,
that of his aspect to have an identity, of his eyes
to have a consciousness, of his hair to have a
colour, of his nose to have a form, of his mouth
to have a motion, of his voice to consent to any
separation of sounds, made intercourse with him
at once extremely easy and extraordinarily empty ;
it was deprived of the flicker of anything by the
way and resembled the act of moving forward
in a perfectly-rolling carriage with the blind of
each window neatly drawn down.

Gray sometimes advanced to the edge of trying
him, so to call it, as to the impression made on him
by lack of recognitions assuredly without pre-
cedent in any experience, any, least of all, of the
ways of beneficiaries ; but under the necessity
on each occasion of our young man's falling back
from the vanity of supposing himself really pre-
sentable or apprehensible. For a grasp of him
on such ground to take place he should have had
first to show himself and to catch his image some-
how reflected ; simply walking up and down and
shedding bland gratitude -didn't convey or ex-
hibit or express him in this case, as he was sure
these things had on the other hand truly done

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where everyone else, where his uncle and Rosanna,
where Mr. Gaw and even Miss Mumby, where
splendid Vinty, whom he so looked to, and awfully
nice Davey Bradham, whom he so took to, were
concerned. It all came back to the question of
terms and to the perception, in varying degrees,
on the part of these persons, of his own ; for there
were somehow none by which Mr. Crick was pene-
trable that would really tell anything about him,
and he could wonder in freedom if he wasn't then
to know too that last immunity from any tax on
his fortune which would consist in his having
never to wince. Against wincing in other relations
than this one he was prepared, he only desired,
to take his precautions — visionary precautions in
those connections truly swarming upon him ; but
apparently he was during these first days of the
mere grossness of his reality to learn something
of the clear state of seeing every fond sacrifice to
superstition that he could think of thrust back
at him. If he could but have brought his visitor
to say after twenty-four hours of him " Well,
you're the damnedest little idiot I've ever had
to pretend to hold commerce with ! " that would
on the spot have pressed the spring of his rich
sacrificial " Oh I must be, I must be ! — how can
I not abjectly and gratefully be ? " Something
at least would so have been done to placate the
jealous gods. But instead of that the grossness
of his reality just flatly included this supremely

THE IVORY TOWER

useful friend's perhaps supposing him a vulgar
voluptuary, or at least a mere gaping maw, cyni-
cally, which amounted to say frivolously, indiffer-
ent to everything but the general fact of his wind-
fall. Strange that it should be impossible in any
particular whatever to inform or to correct Mr.
Crick, who sat unapproachable in the midst of
the only knowledge that concerned him.

He couldn't help feeling it conveyed in the
very breath of the summer airs that played about
him, to his fancy, in a spirit of frolic still lighter
and quicker than they had breathed in other
climes, he couldn't help almost seeing it as the
spray of sea-nymphs, or hearing it as the sounded
horn of tritons, emerging, to cast their spell, from
the foam-flecked tides around, that he was regarded
as a creature rather unnaturally " quiet " there
on his averted verandahs and in his darkened
halls, even at moments when quite immense
things, by his own measure, were happening to
him. Everything, simply, seemed to be happening,
and happening all at once — as he could say to
himself, for instance, by the fact of such a mere
matter as his pulling up at some turn of his now
renewedly ceaseless pacing to take in he could
scarce have said what huge though soft collective
rumble, what thick though dispersed exhalation,
of the equipped and appointed life, the life that
phrased itself with sufficient assurance as the
multitudinous throb of Newport, borne toward

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him from vague regions, from behind and beyond
his temporary blest barriers, and representing
for the first time in his experience an appeal direc-
ted at him from a source not somewhat shabbily
single. An impression like that was in itself an
event — so repeatedly in his other existence (it
was already his quite unconnectedly other) had
the rumour of the world, the voice of society, the
harmonies of possession, been charged, for his
sensibility, with reminders which, so far from
suggesting association, positively waved him off
from it. Mr. Betterman's funeral, for all the rigour
of simplicity imposed on it by his preliminary
care, had enacted itself in a ponderous, numerous,
in fact altogether swarming and resounding way ;
the old local cemetery on the seaward-looking
hillside, as Gray seemed to identify it, had served
for the final scene, and our young man's sense of
the whole thing reached its finest point in an un-
answered question as to whether the New York
business world or the New York newspaper interest
were the more copiously present. The business
world broke upon him during the recent rites in
large smooth tepid waves — he was conscious of
a kind of generalised or, as they seemed to be
calling it, standardised face, as of sharpness without
edge, save when edge was unexpectedly impro-
vised, bent upon him for a hint of what might
have been better expressed could it but have
been expressed humorously ; while the news-
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paper interest only fed the more full, he felt
even at the time, from the perfectly bare plate
offered its flocking young emissaries by the most
recognising eye at once and the most deprecating
dumbness that he could command.

He had asked Vinty, on the morrow of Vinty's
evening visit, to " act " for him in so far as this
might be ; upon which Vinty had said gaily — he
was unexceptionally gay now — " Do you mean
as your best man at your marriage to the bride
who is so little like St. Francis's ? much as you
yourself strike me, you know, as resembling the
man of Assisi." Vinty, at his great present
ease, constantly put things in such wonder ul
ways ; which were nothing, however, to the way
he mostly did them during the days he was able
to spare before going off again to other calls, other
performances in other places, braver and breezier
places on the bolder northern coast, it mostly
seemed : his allusions to which excited absolutely
the more curious interest in his friend, by an odd
law, in proportion as he sketched them, under
pressure, as probably altogether alien to the
friend's sympathies. That was to be for the time,
by every indication, his amusing " line " — his
taking so confident and insistent a view of what
it must be in Gray's nature and tradition to like
or not to like that, as our young man for that
matter himself assured him, he couldn't have
invented a more successfully insidious way of

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creating an appetite than by passing under a
fellow's nose every sort of whiff of the indigestible.
One thing at least was clear, namely : that, let
his presumption of a comrade's susceptibilities,
his possible reactions, under general or particular
exposure, approve itself or not, the extent to which
this free interpreter was going personally to signify
for the savour of the whole stretched there as a
bright assurance. Thus he was all the while acting
indeed — acting so that fond formulations of it
could only become in the promptest way mere
redundancies of reference ; he acted because his
approach, his look, his touch made somehow, by
their simply projecting themselves, a definite differ-
ence for any question, great or small, in the least
subject to them ; and this, after the most extra-
ordinary fashion, not in the least through his
pressing or interfering or even so much as intend-
ing, but just as a consequence of his having a
sense and an intelligence of the given affair, such
as it might be, to which, once he was present at
it, he was truly ashamed not to conform. That
concentrated passage between the two men while
the author of their situation was still unburied
would of course always hover to memory's eye
like a votive object in the rich gloom of a chapel ;
but it was now disconnected, attached to its hook
once for all, its whole meaning converted with
such small delay into working, playing force and
multiplied tasteable fruit.

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Quiet as he passed for keeping himself, by the
impression I have noted, how could Gray have
felt more plunged in history, how could he by his
own sense more have waked up to it each morn-
ing and gone to bed with it each night, sat down
to it whenever he did sit down, which was never
for long, whether at a meal, at a book, at a letter,
or at the wasted endeavour to become, by way of
a change, really aware of his consciousness, than
through positively missing as he did the hint of
anything in particular to do ? — missing and missing
it all the while and yet at no hour paying the least
of the penalties that are supposed to attend the
drop of responsibility and the substituted rule
of fatuity. How couldn't it be agitation of a really
sublime order to have it come over one that the
personage in the world one must most resemble
at such a pitch would be simply, at one's choice,
the Kaiser or the Czar, potentates who only know
their situation is carried on by attestation of the
fact that push it wherever they will they never
find it isn't ? Thus they are referred to the exist-
ence of machinery, the working of which machinery
is answered for, they may feel, whenever their
eyes rest on one of those figures, ministerial or
ceremonial, who may be, as it is called, in waiting.
Mr. Crick was in waiting, Horton Vint was in
waiting, Rosanna Gaw even, at this moment a
hundred miles away, was in waiting, and so was
Davey Bradham, though with but a single appear-

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ance at the palace as yet to his credit. Neither
Horton nor Mr. Crick, it was true, were more
materially, more recurrently present than a fellow's
nerves, for the wonder of it all, could bear ; but
what was it but just being Czar or Kaiser to keep
thrilling on one's own side before the fact that this
made no difference ? Vulgar reassurance was the
greatest of vulgarities ; monarchs could still be
irresponsible, thanks to their ministers' not being,
and Gray repeatedly asked himself how he should
ever have felt as he generally did if it hadn't been
so absolutely exciting that while the scattered
moments of Horton's presence and the fitful
snatches of telephonic talk with him lasted the
gage of protection, perfectly certain patronising
protection, added a still pleasanter light to his
eye and ring to his voice, casual and trivial as he
clearly might have liked to keep these things.
Great monarchies might be " run," but great
monarchs weren't — unless of course often by the
favourite or the mistress ; and one hadn't a mis-
tress yet, goodness knew, and if one was threatened
with a favourite it would be but with a favourite
of the people too.

History and the great life surged in upon our
hero through such images as these at their fullest
tide, finding him out however he might have tried
to hide from them, and shaking him perhaps even
with no livelier question than when it occurred
to him for the first time within the week, oddly

245

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enough, that the guest of the Bradhams never
happened, while his own momentary guest, to
meet Mr. Crick, in his counsels, by so much as an
instant's overlapping, any more than it would
chance on a single occasion that he should name
his friend to that gentleman or otherwise hint at
his existence, still less his importance. Was it
just that the king was usually shy of mentioning
the favourite to the head of the treasury and that
various decencies attached, by tradition, to keep-
ing public and private advisers separate ? " Oh
I absolutely decline to come in, at any point what-
ever, between you and him ; as if there were any
sort of help I can give you that he won't ever so
much better ! " — those words had embodied, on
the morrow, Vinty's sole allusion to the main
sense of their first talk, which he had gone on with
in no direct fashion. He had thrown a ludicrous
light on his committing himself to any such
atrocity of taste while the empowered person and
quite ideally right man was about ; but points
would come up more and more, did come up, in
fact already had, that they doubtless might work
out together happily enough ; and it took Horton
in fine the very fewest hours to give example
after example of his familiar and immediate wit.
Nothing could have better illustrated this than
the interest thrown by him for Gray over a couple
of subjects that, with many others indeed, be-
guiled three or four rides taken by the friends

246

THE IVORY TOWER

along the indented shores and other seaside
stretches and reaches of their low-lying promon-
tory in the freshness of the early morning and when
the scene might figure for themselves alone. Gray,
clinging as yet to his own premises very much
even as a stripped swimmer might loiter to enjoy
an air-bath before his dive, had yet mentioned
that he missed exercise and had at once found
Vinty full of resource for his taking it in that
pleasantest way. Everything, by his assurance,
was going to be delightful but the generality of
the people ; thus, accordingly, was the generality
of the people not yet in evidence, thus at the sweet
hour following the cool dawn could the world he
had become possessed of spread about him un-
spoiled.

It was perhaps in Gray to wonder a little in
these conditions what was then in evidence, with
decks so invidiously cleared ; this being, however,
a remark he forbore to make, mystified as he
had several times been, and somehow didn't like
too much being, by having had to note that to
differ at all from Vinty on occasions apparently
offered was to provoke in him at once a positive
excess of agreement. He always went further,
as it were, and Gray himself, as he might say,
didn't want to go those lengths, which were out
of the range of practical politics altogether.
Morton's habit, as it seemed to show itself, was to
make out of saving sociability or wanton ingenuity

247

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or whatever, a distinction for which a companion
might care, but for which he himself didn't with
any sincerity, and then to give his own side of it
away, from the moment doubt had been deter-
mined, with an almost desolating sweep of sur-
render. His own side of it was by that logic no
better a side, in a beastly vulgar world, than any
other, and if anyone wanted to mean that such
a mundane basis was deficient why he himself
had but meant it from the first and pretended
something else only not to be too shocking. He
was ready to mean the worst — was ready for any-
thing, that is, in the interest of ceasing from hum-
bug. And if Gray was prepared for that then il
ne s'agissait que de s'entendre. What Gray was
prepared for would really take, this young man
frankly opined, some threshing out ; but it wasn't
at all in readiness for the worst that he had come
to America — he had come on the contrary to
indulge, by God's help, in appreciations, com-
parisons, observations, reflections and other
luxuries, that were to minister, fond old prejudice
aiding, to life at the high pitch, the pitch, as who
should say, of immortality. If on occasion, under
the dazzle of Horton's facility, he might ask him-
self how he tracked through it the silver thread
of sincerity — consistency wasn't pretended to —
something at once supervened that was better
than any answer, some benefit of information
that the circumstance required, of judgment

248

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that assisted or supported or even amused, by
felicity of contradiction, and that above all pushed
the question so much further, multiplying its
relations and so giving it air and colour and the
slap of the brush, that it straightway became a
picture and, for the kind of attention Gray could
best render, a conclusive settled matter. He
hated somehow to detract from his friend, want-
ing so much more to keep adding to him ; but it
was after a little as if he had felt that his loyalty,
or whatever he might call it, could yet not be
mean in deciding that Morton's generalisations,
his opinions as distinguished from his perceptions
and direct energies and images, signified little
enough : if he would only go on bristling as he
promised with instances and items, would only
consent to consist at the same rate and in his
very self of material for history, one might pro-
pose to gather from it all at one's own hours
and without troubling him the occasional big
inference.

How good he could be on the particular case
appeared for example after Gray had expressed
to him, just subsequently to their first encounter,
a certain light and measured wonderment at
Rosanna Gaw's appearing not to intend to absent
herself long enough from her cares in the other
State, immense though these conceivably were,
to do what the rest of them were doing round-
about Mr. Betterman's grave. Our young man

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had half taken for granted that she would have
liked, expressing it simply, to assist with him at
the last attentions to a memory that had meant,
in the current phrase, so much for them both —
though of course he withal quite remembered
that her interest in it had but rested on his own
and that since his own, as promoted by her, had
now taken such effect there was grossness perhaps
in looking to her for further demonstrations :
this at least in view of her being under her filial
stress not unimaginably sated with ritual. He
had caught himself at any rate in the act of dream-
ing that Rosanna's return for the funeral would be
one of the inevitabilities of her sympathy with
his fortune — every element of which (that was
overwhelmingly certain) he owed to her ; and
even the due sense that, put her jubilation or
whatever at its highest, it could scarce be ex-
pected to dance the same jig as his, didn't prevent
his remarking to his friend that clearly Miss Gaw
would come, since he himself was still in the stage
of supposing that when you had the consciousness
of a lot of money you sort of did violent things.
He played with the idea that her arrival for the
interment would partake of this element, pro-
ceeding as it might from the exhilaration of her
monstrous advantages, her now assured state.
" Look at the violent things I'm doing," he seemed
to observe with this, " and see how natural I must
feel it that any violence should meet me. Yours,

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for example " — Gray really went so far — " re-
cognises how I want, or at least how I enjoy, a
harmony ; though at the same time, I assure you,
I'm already prepared for any disgusted snub to
the attitude of unlimited concern about me,
gracious goodness, that I may seem to go about
taking for granted." Unlimited concern about
him on the part of the people who weren't up at
the cool of dawn save in so far as they here and
there hadn't yet gone to bed — this, in combination
with something like it on the part of numberless
others too, had indeed to be faced as the inveterate
essence of Vinty's forecast, and formed perhaps
the hardest nut handed to Gray's vice of cogita-
tion to crack ; it was the thing that he just now
most found himself, as they said, up against —
involving as it did some conception of reasons
other than ugly for so much patience with the
boring side of him.

An interest founded on the mere beastly fact
of his pecuniary luck, what was that but an ugly
thing to see, from the moment his circle, since a
circle he was apparently to have, shouldn't soon
be moved to some decent reaction from it ? How
was he going himself to like breathing an air in
which the reaction didn't break out, how was he
going not to get sick of finding so large a part
played, over the place, by the mere constatation,
in a single voice, a huge monotone restlessly and
untiringly directed, but otherwise without appli-

251

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cation, of the state of being worth dollars to in-
ordinate amounts ? Was he really going to want
to live with many specimens of the sort of person
who wouldn't presently rather loathe him than
know him blindedly on such terms ? would it
be possible, for that matter, that he should feel
people unashamed of not providing for their atten-
tion to him any better account of it than his uncle's
form of it had happened to supply, without his
by that token coming to regard them either as
very " interested," according to the good old word,
or as themselves much too foredoomed bores to
merit tolerance ? When it reached the pitch of his
asking himself whether it could be possible Vinty
wouldn't at once see what he meant by that reser-
vation, he patched the question up but a bit pro-
visionally perhaps by falling back on a remark
about this confidant that was almost always equally
in order. They weren't on the basis yet of any
treatable reality, any that could be directly handled
and measured, other than such as were, so to speak,
the very children of accident, those the old man's
still unexplained whim had with its own special
shade of grimness let him in for. Naturally must
it come to pass with time that the better of the
set among whom this easy genius was the best
would stop thinking money about him to the
point that prevented their thinking anything else
— so that he should only break off and not go in
further after giving them a chance to show in a

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less flurried way to what their range of imagination
might reach invited and encouraged. Should
they markedly fail to take that chance it would
be all up with them so far as any entertainment
that he should care to offer them was concerned.
How could it stick out more disconcertingly — so
his appeal might have run — that a fuss about him
was as yet absolutely a fuss on a vulgar basis ?
having begun, by what he gathered, quite before
the growth even of such independent rumours
as Horton's testimony, once he was on the spot,
or as Mr. Bradham's range of anecdote, conse-
quent on Mr. Bradham's call, might give warrant
for : it couldn't have behind it, he felt sure, so
much as a word of Rosanna's, of the heralding
or promising sort — he would so have staked his
right hand on the last impossibility of the least
rash overflow on that young woman's part.

There was this other young woman, of course,
whom he heard of at these hours for the first time
from Haughty and whom he remembered well
enough to have heard praise of from his adopted
father, three or four years previous, on his rejoin-
ing the dear man after a summer's separation.
She would be, "Gussy's" charming friend,
Haughty's charming friend, no end of other
people's charming friend, as appeared, the hero-
ine of the charming friendship his own admirable
friend had formed, in a characteristically headlong
manner (some exceptional cluster of graces, in

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her case, clearly much aiding) with a young
American girl, the very nicest anyone had ever
seen, met at the waters of Ragatz during one of
several seasons there and afterwards described
in such extravagant terms as were to make her
remain, between himself and his elder, a subject
of humorous reference and retort. It had had to
do with Gray's liking his companion of those years
always better and better that persons intrinsically
distinguished inveterately took to him so naturally
— even if the number of the admirers rallying was
kept down a little by the rarity, of course, of in-
trinsic distinction. It wasn't, either, as if this
blest associate had been by constitution an elderly
flirt, or some such sorry type, addicted to vain
philanderings with young persons he might have
fathered : he liked young persons, small blame to
him, but they had never, under Gray's observation,
made a fool of him, and he was only as much of
one about the young lady in question, Cecilia
Foy, yes, of New York, as served to keep all later
enquiry and pleasantry at the proper satiric pitch.
She would have been a fine little creature, by our
friend's beguiled conclusion, to have at once so
quickened and so appreciated the accidental
relation ; for was anything truly quite so charm-
ing in a clever girl as the capacity for admiring
disinterestedly a brave gentleman even to the point
of willingness to take every trouble about him ?
— when the disinterestedness dwelt, that is, in the

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very pleasure she could seek and find, so much
more creditable a matter to her than any she
could give and be complimented for giving, in-
volved as this could be with whatever vanity,
vulgarity or other personal pretence.

Gray remembered even his not having missed by
any measure of his own need or play of his own
curiosity the gain of Miss Foy's acquaintance — so
might the felicity of the quaint affair, given the
actual parties, have been too sacred to be breathed
on ; he in fact recalled, and could still recall,
every aspect of their so excellent time together
reviving now in a thick rich light, how he had
inwardly closed down the cover on his stepfather's
accession of fortune — which the pretty episode
really seemed to amount to ; extracting from
it himself a particular relief of conscience. He
could let him alone, by this showing, without
black cruelty — so little had the day come for his
ceasing to attract admirers, as they said, at public
places or being handed over to the sense of deser-
tion. That left Gray as little as possible haunted
with the young Cecilia's image, so completely
was his interest in her, in her photograph and in
her letters, one of the incidents of his virtually
filial solicitude ; all the less in fact no doubt that
she had written during the aftermonths frequently
and very advertisedly, though perhaps, in spite
of Mr. Northover's gay exhibition of it, not so
very remarkably. She was apparently one of the

255

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bright persons who are not at their brightest with
the pen — which question indeed would perhaps
come to the proof for him, thanks to his having
it ever so vividly, not to say derisively, from
Horton that this observer didn't really know what
had stayed her hand, for the past week, from an
outpouring to the one person within her reach
who would constitute a link with the delightful
old hero of her European adventure. That so
close a representative of the party to her romance
was there in the flesh and but a mile or two off,
was a fact so extraordinary as to have waked up
the romance again in her and produced a state
of fancy from which she couldn't rest — for some
shred of the story that might be still afloat. Gray
therefore needn't be surprised to receive some
sign of this commotion, and that he hadn't yet
done so was to be explained, Haughty guessed,
by the very intensity of the passions involved.

One of them, it thus appeared, burnt also in
Gussy's breast ; devoted as she was to Cissy, she
had taken the fond anecdote that so occupied
them as much under her protection as she had
from far back taken the girl's every other interest,
and what for the hour paralysed their action, that
of the excited pair, must simply have been that
Mrs. Bradham couldn't on the one hand listen
to anything so horrid as that her young friend
should make an advance unprepared and un-
accompanied, and that the ardent girl, on the

256

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other, had for the occasion, as for all occasions,
her ideal of independence. Gray was not himself
impatient — he felt no jump in him at the chance
to discuss so dear a memory in an air still incon-
gruous ; it depended on who might propose to
him the delicate business, let alone its not making
for a view of the great Gussy's fine tact that she
should even possibly put herself forward as a
proposer. However, he didn't mind thinking
that if Cissy should prove all that was likely enough
their having a subject in common couldn't but
practically conduce ; though the moral of it all
amounted rather to a portent, the one that
Haughty, by the same token, had done least to
reassure him against, of the extent to which the
native jungle harboured the female specimen and
to which its ostensible cover, the vast level of
mixed growths stirred wavingly in whatever
breeze, was apt to be identifiable but as an agi-
tation of the latest redundant thing in ladies'
hats. It was true that when Rosanna had per-
fectly failed to rally, merely writing a kind short
note to the effect that she should have to give
herself wholly, for she didn't know how long, to
the huge assault of her own questions, that might
have seemed to him to make such a clearance as
would count against any number of positively
hovering shades. Horton had answered for her
not turning up, and nothing perhaps had made
him feel so right as this did for a faith in those

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general undertakings of assurance ; only, when
at the end of some days he saw that vessel of light
obscured by its swing back to New York and other
ranges of action, the sense of exposure — even as
exposure to nothing worse than the lurking or
pouncing ladies — became sharper through con-
trast with the late guarded interval ; this to the
extent positively of a particular hour at which
it seemed to him he had better turn tail and
simply flee, stepping from under the too vast orb
of his fate.

He was alone with that quantity on the Sep-
tember morning after breakfast as he had not
felt himself up to now; he had taken to pacing
the great verandah that had become his own as
he had paced it when it was still his uncle's, and
it might truly have been a rush of nervous appre-
hension, a sudden determination of terror, that
quickened and yet somehow refused to direct his
steps. He had turned out there for the company
of sea and sky and garden, less conscious than
within doors, for some reason, that Horton was
a lost luxury ; but that impression was presently
to pass with a return of a queer force in his view
of Rosanna as above all somehow wanting, off
and withdrawn verily to the pitch of her having
played him some trick, merely let him in where
she was to have seen him through, failed in fine
of a sociability implied in all her preliminaries.
He found his attention caught, in one of his revo-

THE IVORY TOWER

lutions, by the chair in which Abel Gaw had sat
that first afternoon, pulling him up for their so
unexpectedly intense mutual scrutiny, and when
he turned away a moment after, quitting the
spot almost as if the strange little man's death
that very night had already made him apparitional,
which was unpleasant, it was to drop upon the
lawn and renew his motion there. He circled
round the house altogether at last, looking at it
more critically than had hitherto seemed relevant,
taking the measure, disconcertedly, of its unabashed
ugliness, and at the end coming to regard it very
much as he might have eyed some monstrous
modern machine, one of those his generation was
going to be expected to master, to fly in, to fight
in, to take the terrible women of the future out
for airings in, and that mocked at his incompetence
in such matters while he walked round and round
it and gave it, as for dread of what it might do
to him, the widest berth his enclosure allowed.
In the midst of all of which, quite wonderfully,
everything changed ; he wasn't alone with his
monster, he was in, by this reminder, for connec-
tions, nervous ass as he had just missed writing
himself, and connections fairly glittered, swarm-
ing out at him, in the person of Mr. Bradham,
who stood at the top of a flight of steps from the
gallery, which he had been ushered through the
house to reach, and there at once, by some odd
felicity of friendliness, some pertinence of presence,

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of promise, appeared to make up for whatever
was wrong and supply whatever was absent. It
came over him with extraordinary quickness that
the way not to fear the massed ambiguity was
to trust it, and this florid, solid, smiling person,
who waved a prodigious gold-coloured straw hat
as if in sign of ancient amity, had come exactly
at that moment to show him how.1

1 This ends the first chapter of Book IV. The MS. breaks off with
an unfinished sentence opening the next chapter: "Not the least
pointed of the reflections Gray was to indulge in a fortnight later and
as by a result of Davey Bradham's intervention in the very nick was
that if he had turned tail that afternoon, at the very oddest of all his
hours, if he had prematurely taken to his heels and missed the emissary
from the wonderful place of his fresh domestication, the article on which
he would most irretrievably have dished himself . . ."

26o

NOTES FOR
THE IVORY TOWER

NOTES FOR THE IVORY TOWER

AUGUSTA BRADHAM, " Gussie " Bradham, for
the big social woman. Basil Hunn I think on the
whole for Hero. Graham Rising, which becomes
familiarly Gray Rising, I have considered, but
incline to keep for another occasion.

Horton Crimper, among his friends Haughty
Crimper, seems to me right and best, on the whole,
for my second young man. I don't want for him
a surname intrinsically pleasing ; and this seems
to me of about the good nuance. My Third Man
hereby becomes, I seem to see, Davey Bradham ;
on which, I think, for the purpose and association,
I can't improve.

My Girl, in the relinquished thing, was Cissy
Foy ; and this was all right for the figure there
intended, but the girl here is a very different one,
and everything is altered. I want her name more-
over, her Christian one, to be Moyra, and must
have some bright combination with that ; the
essence of which is a surname of two syllables
and ending in a consonant — also beginning with

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one. I am thinking of Moyra Grabham, the latter
excellent thing was in the Times of two or three
days ago ; its only fault is a little too much mean-
ing, but the sense here wouldn't be thrown into
undue relief, and I don't want anything pretty
or conventionally " pleasing." Everything of the
shade of the real. Remain thus important the
big, the heavy Daughter of the billionaire, with
her father ; in connection with whom I think I
give up Betterman. That must stand over, and
I want, above all, a single syllable. All the other
names have two or three ; and this makes an
objection to the Shimple, which I originally thought
of as about odd and ugly enough without being
more so than I want it. But that also will keep,
while I see that I have the monosyllable Hench
put down ; only put down for another connection.
I see I thought of " Wenty " Hench, short for
Wentworth, as originally good for Second Young
Man. If I balance that against Haughty Crimper,
I incline still to the latter, for the small amuse-
ment of the Haughty. On the other hand I am
not content with Hench, though a monosyllable,
for the dear Billionaire girl, in the light of whom
it is alone important to consider the question,
her Father so little mattering after she becomes
by his death the great Heiress of the time. And
I kind of want to make her Moyra ; with which
I just spy in the Times a wonderful and admirable
" Chown " ; which makes me think that Moyra

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Chown may do. Besides which if I keep Grabham
for my " heroine " I feel the Christian name
should there be of one syllable. All my others
are of two ; and I shall presently make the case
right for this, finding the good thing. The above
provides for the time for the essential. Yet sud-
denly I am pulled up — Grabham, after all, won't
at all do if I keep Bradham for the other connec-
tion ; which I distinctly prefer : I want nothing
with any shade of a special sense there. Accord-
ingly, I don't know but what I may go in for a
different note altogether and lavish on her the
fine Cantupher ; which I don't want however
really to waste. When Cantupher is used there
ought to be several of it, and above all men : no,
I see it won't do, and besides I don't want any-
thing positively fine. I like Wither, and I like
Augurer, and I like, in another note, Damper,
and I even see a little Bessie as a combination
with it, though I don't on the whole want a Bessie.
At any rate I now get on.

1What I want the first Book to do is to present
the Gaws, the Bradhams and Cissy Foy, in Three
Chapters or Scenes, call them Scenes of the Acts,
in such a way that I thus present with them the

1 From this point the names of the characters, most of which were
still uncertain, are given in accordance with Henry James' final choice ;
though it may be noted that he was to the end dissatisfied with the
name of Cissy Foy and meant to choose another.

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first immediate facts involved ; or in other words
present the first essence of the Situation. What
I see is, as I further reflect, that it is better to
get Graham Fielder there within the Act, to have
him on the premises already, and learnt so to be,
before it has progressed beyond the first Scene ;
though he be not seen till the Second Book. When
Rosanna goes over to her Father it befals before
she has had more than twenty words with him
that one of the Nurses who is most sympathetic
to her appears in the long window that opens
from the house on to the verandah, and it is thus
at once disclosed that he has come. Rosanna has
taken for granted from the quiet air of the place
that this event hasn't yet occurred ; but Gray
has in fact arrived with the early morning, has
come on the boat from New York, the night one,
and is there above with, or ready to be with, the
dying man. Perfectly natural and plausible I
make it that he doesn't begin at once to pervade
the place ; delicacy, discretion, anxiety naturally
operating with him ; so that we know only he is
there, and that matters are more or less taking
place above, during the rest of the Book. But
the fact in question immediately determines, for
proprieties' and discretions' sake, the withdrawal
of Rosanna and her Father ; they return to their
own abode ; and I see the rest of the business of
the act as taking place partly there and partly,
by what I make out, on the Bradhams' own

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premises, the field of the Third Scene. Here is
the passage between the two young women that

1 require, and my Heroine, I think, must be on a
visit of a number of days to Gussie. I want Davey
first with Rosanna, and think I get something
like his having walked over, along the cliff, to
their house, to bring her, at his wife's request,
over to tea. Yes, I have Davey's walk back with
Rosanna, and her Father's declining to come,
or saying that he will follow afterward ; his real
design being to sneak over again, as I may call
it, to the other house, in the exercise of his in-
tense curiosity. That special founded and motived
condition is what we sufficiently know him by
and what he is for the time (which is all the time
we have of him) identified by. I get thus for Book

2 that Gray, latish in the afternoon, coming down
from his uncle's quarter, finds him, has a passage
or scene with him, above all an impression of him ;
and this before he has had any other : we learn
that he hasn't seen his uncle yet ; the judgment
of the doctors about this being operative and
they wishing a further wait. I want Rosanna's
Father for his first very sharp impression ; this
really making, I think, Scene First of Book 2.
It gives me Scene 2 for what I shall then want
without further delay of his first introduction
to his Uncle's room and his half hour, or whatever,
there ; with the fact determined of the non-col-
lapse of the latter, his good effect from the meeting

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quite rather, and the duration of him determined
to end of Book 2. After Book 2 he is no more.
Scene 3 of Book 2 then can only be, for Gray, with
Rosanna; that scene having functions to be
exercised with no more delay at all, by what I
make out, and being put in, straight, then and
there, that we may have the support of it. I
by the same token see Book 3 now as functional
entirely for the encounter of Gray with the two
other women and, for the first time, with Davey ;
and also as preparing the appearance of Horton
Vint, though not producing it. I see him, in fact,

1 think, as introduced independently of his first
appearance to Gray, see it as a matter of his relation
with Cissy, and as lighting up what I immediately
want of their situation. In fact don't I see
this as Morton's " Act " altogether, as I shall have
seen and treated Book i as Rosanna's, and Book

2 as Gray's. By the blest operation this time of
my Dramatic principle, my law of successive
Aspects, each treated from its own centre, as,
though with qualifications, The Awkward Age,
I have the great help of flexibility and variety ;
my persons in turn, or at least the three or four
foremost, having control, as it were, of the Act
and Aspect, and so making it his or making it
hers. This of course with the great inevitable
and desirable preponderance, in the Series, of
Gray's particular weight. But I seem to make
out, to a certainty, at least another " Act " for

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Rosanna and probably another for Horton ;
though perhaps not more than one, all to herself,
for Cissy. I say at least another for Horton on
account of my desire to give Gray as affecting
Horton, only less than I want to give Horton as
affecting Gray. It is true that I get Gray as affect-
ing Horton more or less in Book 3, but as the
situation developes it will make new needs, de-
terminations and possibilities. All this for feeling
my way and making things come, more and more
come. I want an Aspect under control of Davey,
at all events — this I seem pretty definitely to
feel ; but things will only come too much. At
all events, to retreat, remount, a little there are
my 3 first Books sufficiently started without my
having as yet exactly noted the absolutely
fundamental antecedents. But before I do this,
even, I memorise that Gray's Scene with Rosanna
for 3 of Book 2 shall be by her coming over to
Mr. Betterman's house herself that evening, all
frankly and directly, to see him there ; not by his
going over to her. And I seem to want it evening ;
the summer night outside, with their moving
about on the Terrace and above the sea etc. Withal,
by the same token, I want such interesting things
between them from immediately after the pro-
mulgation of Mr. Betterman's Will ; I want
that, but of course can easily get it, so far as any-
thing is easy, in Book 4, the function of which
is to present Gray as face to face with the situation

269

THE IVORY TOWER

so created for him. This is obviously, of course,
one of Gray's Aspects, and the next will desirably
be, I dare say too ; can only be, so far as I can
now tell, when I consider that the Book being my
Fourth, only Six of the Ten which I most devoutly
desire to limit the thing to then remain for
my full evolution on the momentum by that time
imparted. Certainly, at all events, the Situation
leaves Newport, to come to life, its full life, in
New York, where I seem to see it as going on to
the end, unless I manage to treat myself to some
happy and helpful mise-en-scene or exploitation
of my memory of (say) California. The action
entirely of American localisation, as goes without
saying, yet making me thus kind of hanker, for
dear "amusement's" sake, to decorate the thing
with a bit of a picture of some American Some-
where that is not either Newport or N.Y. I even
ask myself whether Boston wouldn't serve for
this garniture, serve with a narrower economy
than "dragging in" California. I kind of want
to drag in Boston a little, feeling it as naturally
and thriftily workable. But these are details
which will only too much come ; and I seem to
see already how my action, however tightly
packed down, will strain my Ten Books, most
blessedly, to cracking. That is exactly what I
want, the tight packing and the beautifully
audible cracking ; the most magnificent masterly
little vivid economy, with a beauty of its own

270

THE IVORY TOWER

equal to the beauty of the donnee itself, that ever
was.

However, what the devil are, exactly, the little
fundamentals in the past ? Fix them, focus them
hard ; they need only be perfectly conceivable,
but they must be of the most lucid sharpness.
I want to have it that for Gray, and essentially
for Rosanna, it's a renewal of an early, almost,
or even quite positively, childish beginning ; and
for Gray it's the same with Horton Vint — the
impression of Horton already existing in him,
a very strong and " dazzled " one, made in the
quite young time, though in a short compass of
days, weeks, possibly months, or whatever, and
having lasted on (always for Gray) after a fashion
that makes virtually a sort of relation already
established, small as it ostensibly is. Such his
relation with Rosanna, such his relation with

Horton — but for his relation with Cissy ?

Do I want that to be also a renewal, the residuum
of an old impression, or a fresh thing altogether ?
What strikes me prima facie is that it's better to
have two such pre-established origins for the
affair than three ; the only question is does that
sort of connection more complicate or more sim-
plify for that with Cissy? It more simplifies if
I see myself wanting to give, by my plan, the full
effect of a revolution in her, a revolution marked
the more by the germ of the relation being thrown
back, marked the more, that is, in the sense of

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the shade of perfidy, treachery, the shade of the
particular element and image that is of the essence,
so far as she is concerned, of my action. How
this exactly works I must in a moment go into
— hammer it out clear ; but meanwhile there are
these other fundamentals. Gray then is the son
of his uncle's half-sister, not sister (on the whole,
I think) ; whose dissociation from her rich
brother, before he was anything like so rich, must
have followed upon her marrying a man with
whom he, Mr. Betterman, was on some peculiarly
bad terms resulting from a business difference
or quarrel of one of those rancorous kinds that
such lives (as Mr. Betterman's) are plentifully
bestrown with. The husband has been his victim,
and he hasn't hated him, or objected to him for
a brother-in-law, any the less for that. The
objected-to brother-in-law has at all events died
early, and the young wife, with her boy, her scant
means, her disconnection from any advantage
to her represented by her half-brother, has be-
taken herself to Europe ; where the rest of that
history has been enacted. I see the young husband,
Gray's father, himself Graham Fielder the elder or
whatever, as dying early, but probably dying
in Europe, through some catastrophe to be de-
termined, two or three years after their going
there. This is better than his dying at home,
for removal of everything from nearness to Mr.
Betterman. Betterman has been married and has

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had children, a son and a daughter, this is indis-
pensable, for diminution of the fact of paucity of
children ; but he has lost successively these be-
longings— there is nothing over strange in it ;
the death of his son, at 16 or 18 or thereabouts,
having occurred a few years, neither too few nor
too many, before my beginning, and having been
the sorest fact of his life. Well then, young Mrs.
Fielder or whoever, becomes thus in Europe an
early widow, with her little boy, and there, after
no long time, marries again, marries an alien, a
European of some nationality to be determined,
but probably an Englishman ; which completes
the effect of alienation from her brother — easily
conceivable and representable as, " in his way,"
disliking this union ; and indeed as having made
known to her, across the sea, that if she will for-
bear from it (this when he first hears of it and
before it has taken place) and will come back to
America with her boy, he will " forgive " her and
do for her over there what he can. The great fact
is that she declines this condition, the giving up
of her new fiance, and thereby declines an advan-
tage that may, or might have, become great for
her boy. Not so great then — Betterman not then
so rich. But in fine — With which I cry Eureka,
eureka ; I have found what I want for Rosanna's
connection, though it will have to make Rosanna
a little older than Gray, 2 or 3 or 3 or 4 years,
instead of same age. I see Gray's mother at any
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rate, with her small means, in one of the smaller
foreign cities, Florence or Dresden, probably the
latter, and also see there Rosanna and her mother,
this preceding by no long time the latter's death.
Mrs. Gaw has come abroad with her daughter,
for advantages, in the American way, while the
husband and father is immersed in business cares
at home ; and when the two couples, mother and
son, and mother and daughter, meet in a natural
way, a connection is more or less prepared by the
fact of Mr. Gaw having had the business associa-
tion with Mrs. Fielder's half-brother, Mr. Better-
man, at home, even though the considerably
violent rupture or split between the two men
will have already taken place. Mrs. Gaw is a very
good simple, a bewildered and pathetic rich woman,
in delicate health, and is sympathetic to Gray's
mother, on whom she more or less throws herself
for comfort and support, and Gray and Rosanna,
Rosanna with a governess and all the facilities
and accessories natural to wealth, while the boy's
conditions are much leaner and plainer — the two,
I say, fraternise and are good friends ; he figuring
to Rosanna (say he is about 13, while she is 16)
as a tremendously initiated and informed little
polyglot European, knowing France, Germany,
Italy etc. from the first. It is at this juncture
that Mrs. Fielder's second marriage has come into
view, or the question and the appearance of it ;
and that, very simultaneously, the proposal has

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come over from her half-brother on some rumour
of it reaching him. As already mentioned, Better-
man proposes to her that if she will come back
to America with her boy, and not enter upon the
union that threatens, and which must have par-
ticular elements in it of a nature to displease and
irritate him, he will look after them both, educate
the boy at home, do something substantial for
them. Mrs. Fielder takes her American friend
into her confidence in every way, introduces to
her the man who desires to marry her, whom
Rosanna sees and with whom the boy himself
has made great friends, so that the dilemma of the
poor lady becomes a great and lively interest to
them all ; the pretendant himself forming also
a very good relation with the American mother
and daughter, the friends of his friend, and putting
to Mrs. Gaw very eagerly the possibility of her
throwing her weight into the scale in his favour.
Her meeting, that is Mrs. Fielder's meeting, the
proposition from New York involves absolutely
her breaking off with him ; and he is very much
in love with her, likes the boy, and, though he
doesn't want to stand in the latter's light, has
hopes that he won't be quite thrown over. The
engagement in fact, with the marriage near at
hand, must be an existing reality. It is for Mrs.
Fielder something of a dilemma ; but she is very
fond of her honourable suitor, and her inclinations
go strongly to sticking to him. She takes the boy

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himself into her confidence, young as he is, —
perhaps I can afford him a year or two more —
make him 15, say ; in which case Rosanna becomes
18, and the subsequent chronology is thereby
affected. It isn't, I must remember, as a young
man in his very first youth, at all, that I want
Gray, or see him, with the opening of the story
at Newport. On the contrary all the proprieties,
elements of interest, convenience etc., are pro-
moted by his being not less than 30. I don't see
why I shouldn't make him 33, with Rosanna thus
two years older, not three. If he is 15 in Dresden
and she 17, it will be old enough for each, without
being too old, I think, for Gray. 18 years will
thus have elapsed from the crisis at Florence or
wherever to the arrival at Newport. I want that
time, I think, I can do with it very well for what
I see of elements operative for him ; and a period
of some length moreover is required for bringing
the two old men at Newport to a proper pitch
of antiquity. Mr. Betterman dies very much
in the fulness of years, and as Rosanna' s parent
is to pass away soon after I want him to have
come to the end. If Gray is 15, however, I mustn't
make his mother too mature to inspire the de-
votion of her friend ; at the same time that there
must have been years enough for her to have
lived awhile with her first husband and lost him.
Of course this first episode may have been very
brief — there is nothing to prevent that. If she

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had married at 20 she will then be, say, about
36 or so at the time of the crisis, and this will be
quite all right for the question of her second
marriage. Say she lives a considerable number
of years after this, in great happiness, her marriage
having taken place ; I in fact require her to do
so, for I want Gray to have had reasons fairly
strong for his not having been back to America
in the interval. I may put it that he has, even,
been back for a very short time, on some matter
connected with his mother's interests, or his own,
or whatever ; but I complicate the case thereby
and have to deal somehow with the question of
whether or no he has then seen Mr. Betterman.
No, I don't want him to have been back, and
can't do with it ; keep this simple and workable.
All I am doing here is just to fix a little his chron-
ology. Say he has been intending to go over at
about 25, when his mother's death takes place,
about 10 years after her second marriage. Say
then, as is very conceivable, that his stepfather,
with whom he has become great friends, then
requires and appeals to his care and interest in a
way that keeps him on and on till the latter's
death takes place just previous to Mr. Betterman's
sending for him. This gives me quite sufficiently
what I want of the previous order of things ; but
doesn't give me yet the fact about Rosanna's
connection in her young history which I require.
I see accordingly what has happened in Florence

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or Dresden as something of this kind : that Mrs.
Fielder, having put it to her boy that he shall
decide, if he can, about what they shall do, she
lets Mrs. Gaw, who was at this juncture in constant
intercourse with her, know that she has done so —
Mrs. Gaw and Rosanna being, together, exceed-
ingly interested about her, and Rosanna ex-
tremely interested, in a young dim friendly way,
about Gray ; very much as if he were the younger
brother she hasn't got, and whom, or an older,
she would have given anything to have. Rosanna
hates Mr. Betterman, who has, as she understands
and believes, in some iniquitous business way,
wronged or swindled her father ; and isn't at all
for what he has proposed to the Fielders. In
addition she is infatuated with Europe, makes
everything of being there, dreams, or would dream,
of staying on if she could, and has already in
germ, in her mind, those feelings about the dread-
ful American money-world of which she figures
as the embodiment or expression in the eventual
situation. She knows thus that the boy has had,
practically, the decision laid upon him, and with
the whole case with all its elements and possibili-
ties before her she takes upon herself to act upon
him, influence and determine him. She wouldn't
have him accept Mr. Betterman' s cruel pro-
position, as she declares she sees it, for the world.
She proceeds with him as she would in fact with
a younger brother : there is a passage to be alluded

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to with a later actuality, which figures for her
in memory as her creation of a responsibility ;
her very considerably passionate, and thereby
meddlesome, intervention. I see some long
beautiful walk or stroll, some visit to some charm-
ing old place or things — and Florence is here
indicated — during which she puts it all to him,
and from which he, much inspired and affected
by her, comes back to say to his mother that he
doesn't want what is offered — at any such price
as she will have to pay. I see this occasion as
really having settled it — and Rosanna's having
always felt and known that it did. She and her
mother separate then from the others ; Mrs.
Fielder communicates her refusal, sticks to her
friend, marries him shortly afterward, and her
subsequent years take the form I have noted.
The American mother and daughter go back
across the sea ; the mother in time dies etc. I
see also how much better it is to have sufficient
time for these various deaths to happen. But
the point is that the sense of responsibility, be-
getting gradually a considerable, a deepening
force of reflection, and even somewhat of remorse,
as to all that it has meant, is what has taken place
for Rosanna in proportion as, by the sequence
of events and the happening of many things, Mr.
Betterman has grown into an apparently very
rich old man with no natural heir. His losses,
his bereavements, I have already alluded to, and

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a considerable relaxation of her original feeling
about him in the light of more knowledge and of
other things that have happened. In the light,
for instance, of her now mature sense of what her
father's career has been and of all that his great
ferocious fortune, as she believes it to be, re-
presents of rapacity, of financial cruelty, of con-
summate special ability etc. She has kept to some
extent in touch with Gray, so far that is as knowing
about his life and general situation are concerned ;
but the element of compunction in her itself, and
the sense of what she may perhaps have deprived
him of in the way of a great material advantage,
may be very well seen, I think, as keeping her
shy and backward in respect to following him up
or remaining in intercourse. It isn't likely, for
the American truth of things, that she hasn't been
back to Europe again, more than once, whether
before or after her mother's death ; but what I
can easily and even interestingly see is that on
whatever occasion of being there she has yet not
tried to meet him again. She knows that neither
he nor his stepfather are at all well off, she has
a good many general impressions and has tried
to get knowledge of them, without directly appeal-
ing for it to themselves, whenever she can. Thus
it is, to state things very simply, that, on hearing
of the stepfather's death, during the Newport
summer, she has got at Mr. Betterman and spoken
to him about Gray ; she has found him accessible

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to what she wants to say, and has perceived above
all what a pull it gives her to be able to work, in
her appeal, the fact, quite vivid in the fulness of
time to the old man himself indeed, that the
young man, so nearly, after all, related to him,
and over there in Europe all these years, is about
the only person, who could get at him in any way,
who hasn't ever asked anything of him or tried
to get something out of him. Not only this, but
he and his mother, in the time, are the only ones
who ever refused a proffered advantage. I think
I must make it that Rosanna finds that she can
really tell her story to Mr. Betterman, can make
a confidant of him and so interest him only the
more. She feels that he likes her, and this a good
deal on account of her enormous difference from
her father. But I need only put it here quite
simply : she does interest him, she does move
him, and it is as a consequence of her appeal that
he sends for Gray and that Gray comes. What
I must above all take care of is the fact that she
has represented him to the old man as probably
knowing less about money, having had less to do
with it, having moved in a world entirely outside
of it, in a degree utterly unlike anyone and every-
one whom Mr. Betterman has ever seen.

But I have got it all, I needn't develope ; what
I want now independently is the beginning, quite
back in the early years, of some relation on Gray's
part with Horton Vint, and some effect, which I

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think I really must find right, of Morton's having
done something for him, in their boyish time,
something important and gallant, rather showy,
but at all events really of moment, which has
always been present to Gray. This I must find
— it need present no difficulty ; with something
in the general way of their having been at school
together — in Switzerland, with the service
rendered in Switzerland, say on a holiday cours
among the mountains, when Horty has fished
Gray out of a hole, I don't mean quite a crevasse,
but something like, or come to his aid in a tight
place of some sort, and at his own no small risk,
to bring him to safety. In fine it's something
like having saved his life, though that has a tire-
some little old romantic and conventional note.
However I will make the thing right and give it
the right nuance ; remember that it is all allusional
only now and a matter of reference on Gray's part.
What must have further happened, I think, is
that Horty has been in Europe again, in much
later years, after College, indeed only a very few
years previous, and has met Gray again and they
have renewed together ; to the effect of his appre-
hension of Gray's (to him) utterly queer and help-
less and unbusinesslike, unfinancial, type ; and
of Gray's great admiration of everything of the
opposite sort in him — combined, that is, with
other very attractive (as they appear) qualities.
He has made Gray think a lot about the wonderful

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American world that he himself long ago cut so
loose from, and of which Horty is all redolent
and reverberant ; and I think must have told him,
most naturally told him, of what happened in
the far off time in Florence. Only when, then,
was the passage of their being at school, or, better
still, with the Swiss pasteur, or private tutor,
together ? If it was before the episode in Florence
they were rather younger than I seem to see them ;
if it was after they were rather older. Yet I don't
at all see why it should not have been just after —
this perfectly natural at 16 for Gray, at 17 for
Horty ; both thoroughly natural ages for being
with the pasteur, and for the incident afterwards ;
Gray going very naturally to the pasteur, whom
in fact he may have been with already before,
during the first year of his mother's new marriage.
That provides for the matter well enough, and
I've only to see it to possess it ; and gives a basis
for their taking up together somehow when they
meet, wherever I may put it, in the aftertime.
There are forms of life for Gray and his stepfather
to be focussed as the right ones — Horty sees this
pair together somewhere ; and nothing is more
arrangeable, though I don't think I want to show
the latter as having dangled and dawdled about
Italy only ; and on the other hand do see that
Gray's occupation and main interest, other than
that of looking after his elder companions, must
be conceived and presented for him. Again no

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difficulty, however, with the right imagination
of it. Horty goes back to America ; the 3 or 4,
or at the most 4 or 5, years elapse, so that it is
with that comparative freshness of mutual re-
membrance that the two men meet again. What
I do see as definite is that Horty has had up to the
time of Gray's return no sort of relation what-
ever with Mr. Betterman or his affairs, or any point
of the question with which the action begins at
Newport. He is on the other hand in relation with
Cissy ; and there are things I have got to account
for in his actual situation. Why is he without
money, with his interest in the getting of it etc. ?
But that is a question exactly of interest — I mean
to which the answer may afford the greatest.
And settle about the degree of his apprehension
of, relation to, designs on, or general lively con-
sciousness of Rosanna. Important the fact that
the enormous extent of her father's fortune is
known only after his death, and is larger even
than was supposed ; though it is to be remem-
bered that in American financial conditions, with
the immense public activity of money there taking
place, these things are gauged in advance and by
the general knowledge, or speculative measure,
as the oldfashioned private fortune couldn't be.
But I am here up against the very nodus of my
history, the facts of Horty's connection with the
affairs that come into being for Gray under his
uncle's Will ; the whole mechanism, in fine, of

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this part of the action, the situation so created
and its consequences. Enormous difficulty of
pretending to show various things here as with
a business vision, in my total absence of business
initiation ; so that of course my idea has been
from the first not to show them with a business
vision, but in some other way altogether ; this will
take much threshing out, but it is the very basis
of the matter, the core of the subject, and I shall
worry it through with patience. But I must get
it, plan it, utterly right in advance, and this is
what takes the doing. The other doing, the use
of it when schemed, is comparatively easy. What
strikes me first of all is that the amount of money
that Gray comes in for must, for reasons I needn't
waste time in stating, so obvious are they, be no
such huge one, by the New York measure, as in
many another case : it's a tremendous lot of
money for Gray, from his point of view and in
relation to his needs or experience. Thus the
case is that if Mr. Gaw's accumulations or what-
ever have distinctly surpassed expectation, the
other old man's have fallen much below it — or
at least have been known to be no such great
affair anyhow. Various questions come up for
me here, though there is no impossibility of settling
them if taken one by one. The whole point is
of course that Mr. Betterman has been a ruthless
operator or whatever, and with doings Davey
Bradham is able to give Gray so dark an account

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of ; therefore if the mass of money of the acquisi-
tion of which such a picture can be made is not
pretty big, the force of the picture falls a good
deal to the ground. The difficulty in that event,
in view of the bigness, is that the conception of
any act on Horton's part that amounts to a
swindle practised on Gray to such a tremendous
tune is neither a desirable nor a possible one. As
one presses and presses light breaks — there are
so many ways in which one begins little by little
to wonder if on6 may not turn it about. There
is the way in the first place of lowering the pitch
altogether of the quantities concerned for either
men. I see that from the moment ill-gotten money
is concerned the essence of my subject stands
firm whatever the amount of the same — what-
ever the amounts in either case. I haven't pro-
posed from the first at all to be definite, in the
least, about financial details or mysteries — I need
hardly say ; and have even seen myself absolutely
not stating or formulating at all the figure of the
property accruing to Gray. I haven't the least
need of that, and can make the absence of it in
fact a positively good and happy effect. That
is an immense gain for my freedom of conduct ;
and in fine there glimmers upon me, there glim-
mers upon me — - ! The idea, which was vaguely
my first, of the absolute theft practised upon Gray
by Horty, and which Gray's large appeal to his
cleverness and knowledge, and large trust in his

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competence, his own being nil — this theft accepted
and condoned by Gray as a manner of washing
his own hands of the use of the damnosa hereditas
— this thinkable enough in respect to some limited,
even if considerable, amount etc., but losing its
virtue of conceivability if applied to larger and
more complicated things. Vulgar theft I don't
want, but I want something to which Horty is
led on and encouraged by Gray's whole attitude
and state of mind face to face with the impression
which he gets over there of so many of the black
and merciless things that are behind the great
possessions. I want Gray absolutely to inherit
the money, to have it, to have had it, and to let
it go ; and it seems to me that a whole element
of awkwardness will be greatly minimised for
me if I never exactly express, or anything like
it, what the money is. The difficulty is in seeing
any one particular stroke by which Horty can do
what he wants ; it will have to be much rather
a whole train of behaviour, a whole process of
depredation and misrepresentation, which con-
stitutes his delinquency. This, however, would
be and could be only an affair of time ; and my
whole intention, a straight and compact action,
would suffer from this. What I originally saw
was the fact of Gray's detection of Horty in a
piece of extremely ingenious and able malversa-
tion of his funds, the care of which he has made
over to him, and the then determination on his

THE IVORY TOWER

part simply to show the other in silence that he
understands, and on consideration will do nothing ;
this being, he feels in his wrought-up condition
after what he has learnt about the history of the
money, the most congruous way of his ceasing
himself to be concerned with it and of resigning
it to its natural associations. That was the essence
of my subject, and I see as much in it as ever ;
only I see too that it is imaginable about a com-
paratively small pecuniary interest much more
than about a great. It has to depend upon the
kind of malpractice involved ; and I am partly
tempted to ask myself whether Horty's connection
with the situation may not be thinkable as having
begun somewhat further back. One thing is
certain, however ; I don't want any hocus-pocus
about the Will itself — which an anterior connection
for H. would more or less amount to : I want it
just as I have planned it up to the edge of the
circle in which his misdeed is perpetrated. What
glimmers upon me, as I said just now, is the con-
ception of an extreme frankness of understanding
between the two young men on the question of
Gray's inaptitudes, which at first are not at all
disgusts — because he doesn't know ; but which
makes them, the two, have it out together at an
early stage. Yes, there glimmers, there glim-
mers ; something really more interesting, I think,
than the mere nefarious act ; something like a
profoundly nefarious attitude, or even genius :

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I see, I really think I see, the real fine truth of the
matter in that. With which I keep present to me
the whole significance and high dramatic value
of the part played in the action by Cissy Foy ;
have distinct to me her active function as a wheel
in the machine. How it isn't simply Gray and
Horty at all, but Gray and Horty and her \ how
it isn't She and Gray, any more than it's She and
Horty, simply, but is for her too herself and the
two men : in which I see possibilities of the most
interesting. But I must put her on her feet per-
fectly in order to see as I should. Without at all
overstraining the point of previous contacts for
Gray with these three or four others — than which
even at the worst there is nothing in the world
more verisimilitudinous — I want some sort of
relation for him with her started ; this being a
distinct economy, purchased by no extravagance,
and seeing me, to begin with, so much further
on my way. And who, when I bethink myself,
have his contacts been with, after all, over there,
but Horty and Rosanna — the relation to Mr.
Betterman being but of the mere essence. Of
the people who matter the Bradhams are new to
him, and that is all right ; Cissy may have been
seen of him on some occasion over there that is
quite recent, as recent as I like ; all the more
that I must remember how if I want her truly
a Girl I must mind what I'm about with the age
I'm attributing to Gray. I want a disparity, but
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not too great, at the same time that though I
want her a Girl, I want her not too young a one
either. Everything about her, her intelligence,
character, sense of life and knowledge of it, imply
a certain experience and a certain time for that.
The great fact is that she is the poor Girl, and
the " exceptionally clever," in a society of the
rich, living her life with them, and more or less by
their bounty ; being, I seem to see, already a
friend and protegee of Rosanna's, though it isn't
Rosanna but the Bradhams who put her in re-
lation with Gray, whether designedly or not. I
seem to run here the risk a bit of exposure to the
charge of more or less repeating the figure of
Charlotte in The Golden Bowl, with the Bradhams
repeating even a little the Assinghams in that
fiction ; but I shake this reflection off, as having
no weight beyond duly warning ; the situation
being such another affair and the real character-
istics and exhibited proceedings of these three
persons being likewise so other. Say something
shall have passed between Cissy at a then 25, or
24 at most, and Gray " on the other side " ; this
a matter of but two or three occasions, interest-
ing to him, shortly before his stepfather's death
— a person with whom she has then professed
herself greatly struck, to whom she has been some-
how very " nice " : a circumstance pleasing and
touching at the time to Gray, given his great at-
tachment to that charming, or at any rate to Gray

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very attaching, though for us slightly mysterious,
character. Say even if it doesn't take, or didn't,
too much exhibition or insistence, that the meet-
ing has been with the stepfather only, who has
talked with her about Gray, made a point of
Gray, wished she could know Gray, excited her
interest and prepared her encounter for Gray,
in some conditions in which Gray has been tem-
porarily absent from him. Say this little inter-
course has taken place at some " health resort ",
some sanatorium or other like scene of possibili-
ties, where the stepfather, for whom I haven't
even yet a name, is established, making his cure,
staving off the affection of which he dies, while
this interesting young American creature is also
there in attendance on some relative whom she
also has since lost. I multiply my orphans rather,
Charlotte too having been an orphan ; but I can
keep this girl only a half-orphan perhaps if I like.
I kind of want her, for the sake of the character-
istic, to have a mother, without a father ; in which
case her mother, who hasn't died, but got better,
will have been her companion at the health resort ;
though it breaks a little into my view of the girl's
dependence, her isolation etc., her living so much
with these other people, if her mother is about.
On the other hand the mother may be as gently
but a charge the more for her, and so in a manner
conducive ; though it's a detail, at any rate,
settling itself as I get in close — and she would be

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at the worst the only mother in the business.
What I seem to like to have at all events is that
Gray and Cissy, have not met, yet have been
in this indirect relation — complicated further by
the fact of her existing "friendship", say, as a
temporary name for it, with Horton Vint. She
arrives thus with her curiosity, her recollections,
her intelligence — for, there's no doubt about it,
I am, rather as usual, offering a group of the per-
sonally remarkable, in a high degree, all round.
Augusta Bradham, really, is about the only stupid
one, the only approach to a fool, though she too
in her way is a force, a driving one — that is the
whole point ; which happens to mark a difference
also, so far good, from the Assinghams, where it
was the wife who had the intelligence and the
husband who was in a manner the fool. The fact
of the personal values, so to call them, thus
clustered, I of course not only accept, but cherish ;
that they are each the particular individual of
the particular weight being of course of the essence
of my donnee. They are interesting that way
—I have no use for them here in any other.

Horton has meanwhile become in a sort tied
up with Cissy, as she has with him ; through the
particular conditions of their sentiment for each
other — she in love with him, so far as she, by her
conviction and theory, has allowed herself to go
in that direction for a man without money, though
destined somehow to have it, as she feels ; and he

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in love with her under the interdict of a parity
of attitude on the whole " interested " question.
The woman whom he would give truly one of his
limbs to commend himself to is Rosanna, who
perfectly knows it and for whom he serves as
the very compendium and symbol of that danger
of her being approached only on that ground, the
ground of her wealth, which is, by all the mistrusts
and terrors it creates, the deep note of her char-
acter and situation ; that he serves to her as the
very type of what she most dreads, not only the
victory, but the very approach of it, almost con-
stituting thus a kind of frank relation, a kind of
closeness of contact between them, that involves
for her almost a sinister (or whatever) fascination.
It is between him and my ambitious young woman
(I call her ambitious to simplify) that they are in
a manner allies in what may be called their " atti-
tude to society " ; the frankness of their recogni-
tion, on either side, that in a world of money they
can't not go in for it, and that accordingly so long
as neither has it, they can't go in for each other :
though how each would — each makes the other
feel — if it could all be only on a different basis!
Horty's attitude is that he's going to have it some-
how, and he to a certain extent infects her with
this conviction — but that he doesn't wholly do
so is exactly part of the evidence as to that latent
limitation of the general trust in him which I must
a good deal depend on to explain how it is that,

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with his ability, or the impression of this that he
also produces, he hasn't come on further. Deep
down in the girl is her element of participation
in this mistrust too — which is part of the reason
why she hangs back, in spite of the kind of attrac-
tion he has for her, from any consent to, say,
marry him. He, for that matter, hasn't in the
least urged the case either — it hasn't been in him
up to now, in spite of a failure or two, in spite of
the failure notably with Rosanna, to close by a
positive act the always possibly open door to his
marrying money. I see the recognition of all this
between them as of well-nigh the crudest and
the most typical, the most " modern " ; in fact
I see their relation as of a highly exhibitional
value and interest. What the Girl indeed doesn't,
and doesn't want to (up to now) express, is exactly
that limit, and the ground of it, of her faith in him
as a financial conqueror. She is willing more or
less to believe, to confide, in his own confidence
— she sees him indeed as more probably than not
marked for triumphant acquisition ; but the
latent, " deep down " thing is her wonderment
as to the character of his methods — if the so-
called straight ones won't have served or sufficed.
She sees him as a fine adventurer — which is a good
deal too how she sees herself ; but almost crude
though I have called their terms of mutual under-
standing it hasn't come up for them, and I think
it is absolutely never to come up for them, that

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she so far faces this question of his "honour",
or of any capacity in him for deviation from it,
as even to conjure it away. There are depths
within depths between them — and I think I under-
stand what I mean if I say there are also shallows
beside shallows. They give each other rope and
yet at the same time remain tied; that for the
moment is a sufficient formula — once I keep the
case lucid as to what their tie is.

What accordingly does her situation in respect
to Gray come to, and how do I see it work out ?
The answer to that involves of course the question
of what his, in respect to her, comes to, and what
it gives me for interest. She has got her original
impression about him over there as of the man
without means to speak of ; but it is as the heir
to a fortune that she now first sees him, and as
the person coming in virtue of that into the world
she lives in, where her power to guide, introduce
and generally help and aid and comfort him,
shows from the first as considerable. She strikes
him at once as the creature, in all this world,
the most European and the most capable of, as
it were, understanding him intellectually, entering
into his tastes etc. He recognises quickly that,
putting Davey Bradham perhaps somewhat aside,
she is the being, up and down the place, with whom
he is going to be able most to communicate. With
Rosanna he isn't going to communicate " intellec-
tually", aesthetically, and all the rest, the least

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little bit : Rosanna has no more taste than an
elephant ; Rosanna is only morally elephantine,
or whatever it is that is morally most massive
and magnificent. What I want is to get my right
firm joints, each working on its own hinge, and
forming together the play of my machine : they
are the machine, and when each of them is settled
and determined it will work as I want it. The
first of these, definitely, is that Gray does inherit,
has inherited. The next is that he is face to face
with what it means to have inherited. The next
to that is that one of the things it means — though
this isn't the light in which he first sees the fact
— is that the world immensely opens to him, and
that one of the things it seems most to give him,
to offer and present to him, is this brilliant, or
whatever, and interesting young woman. He
doesn't at first at all see her in the light of her
making up to him on account of his money ; she
is too little of a crudely interested specimen
for that, and too sincere in fact to herself — feeling
very much about him that she would certainly
have been drawn to him, after this making of
acquaintance, even if no such advantages attached
to him and he had remained what he had been
up to then. But all the same it is a Joint, and
we see that it is by seeing her as we shall ; I mean
I make it and keep it one by showing " what
goes on " between herself and Horton. I have
blessedly that view, that alternation of view, for my

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process throughout the action. The determina-
tion of her interest toward him — that then is a
Joint. And let me make the point just here that
at first he has nothing but terror, but horror, of
seeing himself affected as Rosanna has been by
her own situation — from the moment, that is, he
begins to take in that she is so affected. He takes
this in betimes from various signs — before that
passes between them which gives him her case
in the full and lucid way in which he comes to
have it. She gives it to him presently — but at
first as her own simply, holding her hand en-
tirely from intimating that his need be at all
like it ; as she must do, for that matter, given
the fact that it is really through her action that
he was brought over to see his uncle. She thinks
her feelings about her own case right and in-
evitable for herself ; but I want to make it an
interesting and touching inconsistency in her that
she desires not to inspire him, in respect to his
circumstances, with any correspondingly justified
sense. Definite is it that what he learns, he learns
not the least mite from herself, though after a
while he comes quite to challenge her on it, but
from Davey Bradham, so far as he learns it, for
the most part, concretely and directly — as many
other impressions as I can suggest helping besides.
I want him at all events to have a full large clear
moment or season of exhilaration, of something
like intoxication, over the change in his conditions,

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before questions begin to come up. An essential
Joint is constituted by their beginning to come
up, and the difference that this begins to make.
What I want of Davey Bradham is that he is a
determinant in this shift of Gray's point of view,
though I want also (and my scenario has practi-
cally provided for that) that the immediate
amusement of his contact with Davey shall be
quite compatible with his not yet waking up, not
yet seeing questions loom. I must keep it well
before me too that his whole enlarged vision of
the money-world, so much more than any other
sort of world, that all these people constitute,
operates inevitably by itself, promotes infinite
reflection, makes a hundred queer and ugly things,
a thousand, ten thousand, glare at him right and
left. A Joint again is constituted by Gray's first
consciousness of malaise, first determination of
malaise, in the presence of more of a vision, and
more and more impression of everything ; which
determination, as I call it, I want to proceed from
some sense in him of Cissy's attitude as affected
by his own reactions, exhibition of questions,
wonderments and, to put it simply and strongly,
rising disgusts. She has appealed to him at the
outset, on his first apprehension of her, exactly
as a poor girl who wasn't meant to be one, who
has been formed by her nature and her experience
to rise to big brilliant conditions, carry them,
take them splendidly, in fine do all justice to them ;

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this under all the first flush of what I have called
his own exhilaration. He hasn't then committed
himself, in the vulgar sense, at all — had only com-
mitted himself, that is, to the appearance of being
interested and charmed : his imaginative expansion
for that matter being naturally too great to permit
for the moment of particular concentration or
limitations. But isn't his incipient fear of begin-
ning to be, of becoming, such another example,
to put it comprehensively, as Rosanna, doesn't
this proceed precisely from the stir in him of certain
disconcerting, complicating, in fact if they go a
little further quite blighting, wonderments in
respect to Cissy's possibilities ? She throws her
weight with him into the happy view of his own ;
which is what he likes her, wants her, at first
encourages her to do, lending himself to it while
he feels himself, as it were, all over. Mrs. Brad-
ham, all the while, backs her up and backs him
up, and is in general as crude and hard and blatant,
as vulgar is what it essentially comes to, in her
exhibited desire to bring about their engagement,
as is exactly required for producing on him just
the wrong effect. Gray's tone to the girl becomes,
again "to simplify : "Oh yes, it's all right that
you should be rich, should have all the splendid
things of this world ; but I don't see, I'm not sure,
of its being in the least right that / should —
while I seem to be making out more and more,
round me, how so many of them are come by."

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It is the insistence on them, the way everyone,
among that lot at any rate, appears aware of no
values but those, that sets up more and more its
effect on his nerves, his moral nerves as it
were, and his reflective imagination. The girl
counters to this of course — she isn't so crude a
case as not to ; she denies that she's the sort of
existence that he thus imputes — all the while
that she only sees in his attitude and his position
a kind of distinction that would simply add to their
situation, simply gild and after a fashion decorate
it, were she to marry him. I want to make another
Joint with her beginning, all the same, to doubt
of him, to think him really perhaps capable of
strange and unnatural things, which she doesn't
yet see at all clearly ; but which take the form
for her of his possibly handing over great chunks
of his money to public services and interests, de-
ciding to be munificent with it, after the fashion
of Rockefellers and their like : though with the
enormous difference that his resources are not
in the slightest degree of that calibre. He's rich;
yes, but not rich enough to remain rich if he goes
in for that sort of overdone idealism. Some passage
bearing on this takes place, I can see, about at
the time when he has the so to call it momentous
season, or scene, or whatever, of confidence or
exchange with Rosanna in which she goes the
whole "figure", as they say, and puts to him
that exactly her misery is in having come in for

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resources that should enable her to do immense
things, but that are so dishonoured and stained
and blackened at their very roots, that it seems
to her that they carry their curse with them, and
that she asks herself what application to "bene-
volence " as commonly understood, can purge
them, can make them anything but continuators,
somehow or other, of the wrongs in which they
had their origin. This, dramatically speaking,
is momentous for Gray, and it makes a sort of
clearing up to realities between him and Rosanna
which offers itself in its turn, distinctly, as a Joint.
It makes its mark for value, has an effect, leaves
things not as they were.

But meanwhile what do I see about Horton,
about the situation between them, so part and
parcel of the situation between Gray and Cissy
and between Horton and Cissy. Absolute the
importance, I of course recognise, of such a pre-
sentation of matters between her and Horton,
and Horton and her, as shall stand behind and
under everything that takes place from this point.
In my adumbration of a scenario for these earlier
aspects I have provided, I think, for this ; at any
rate I do hereby provide. I want to give the effect,
for all it's worth, of their being constantly,
chronically, naturally and, for my drama, deter-
minatively, in communication ; with which it
more and more comes to me that when the great
coup of the action effects itself Gray shall have

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been brought to it as much by the forces deter-
mining it on her behalf, in relation to her, in a
word, as by those determining it in connection
with Horton. She helps him to his solution about
as much as Horton does, and, lucidly, logically,
ever so interestingly, everything between them
up to the verge is but a preparation for that.
Enormous meanwhile the relation with Horton
constituted by his making over to this dazzling
person (by whom moreover he wants to be, con-
sents to be, dazzled) the care or administration
of his fortune ; for which highly characteristic,
but almost, in its freehandedness, abnormally,
there must have been preparation, absolutely,
and oh, as I can see, ever so interestingly, in Book
2, the section containing his face to face parts
with Mr. Betterman. It comes to me as awfully
fine, given the way in which I represent the old
dying man as affected and determined, to sweep
away everything in the matter of precautions
and usualisms, provisions for trusteeships and
suchlike, and lump the whole thing straight on to
the young man, without his having a condition
or a proviso to consider. What I have wanted is
that he should at a stroke, as it were, in those
last enshrouded, but perfectly possessed hours,
make over his testament utterly and entirely,
in the most simplified way possible ; in short by
a sweeping codicil that annihilates what he has
done before and puts Gray in what I want practi-

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cally to count as unconditioned possession. Thank
the Lord I have only to give the effect of this, for
which I can trust myself, without going into the
ghost of a technicality, any specialising demonstra-
tion. I need scarcely tell myself that I don't by
this mean that Gray makes over matters definitely
and explicitly to Horton at once, with attention
called to the tightness with which his eyes are
shut and all his senses stopped or averted ; but
that naturally and inevitably, also interestingly,
this result proceeds, in fact very directly and
promptly springs, from his viewing and treating
his friend as his best and cleverest and vividest
adviser — whom he only doesn't rather abjectly
beg to take complete and irresponsible charge
because he is ashamed of doing so. Two things
very definite here ; one being that Gray isn't in
the least blatant or glorious about his want, ab-
solutely phenomenal in that world, of any faint
shade of business comprehension or imagination,
but is on the contrary so rather helplessly ashamed
of it that he keeps any attitude imputable to him
as much as possible out of the question — and in
fact proceeds in the way I know. He has moments
of confidence — he tells Rosanna, makes a clean
breast to her and with Horton doesn't need to be
explicit, beyond a point, since all his conduct
expresses it. What happens is that little by little,
inevitably, as a consequence of first doing this
for him and then doing that and then the other,

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Horton more and more gets control, gets a kind
of unlimited play of hand in the matter which
practically amounts to a sort of general power
of attorney ; as Gray falls into the position, under
a feeling insurmountably directing him, of signing
anything, everything, that Horton brings to him
for the purpose — but only what Horton brings.
The state of mind and vision and feeling, the state
of dazzlement with reserves and reflections, the
play of reserves and reflections with dazzlement
(which is my convenient word covering here all
that I intend and prefigure) is a part of the very
essence of my subject — which in fine I perfectly
possess. What happens is, further, that, even
with the rapidity which is of the remarkable
nature of the case, Horton shows for a more and
more monied, or call it at first a less and less non-
monied individual ; with an undisguisedness in
this respect which of itself imposes and, vulgarly
speaking, succeeds. I express these things here
crudely and summarily, by rude signs and hints,
in order to express them at all ; but what is of so
high an interest, and so bright and characteristic,
is that Horton is " splendid ", plausible, delightful,
because exactly so logical and happily suggestive,
about all this ; he puts it to Gray that of course
he is helping himself by helping Gray, that of
course his connection with Gray does him good in
the business world and gives him such help to do
things for himself as he has never before had. I

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needn't abound in this sense here, I am too well
possessed of what I see — as I find myself in general
more and more. A tremendous Joint is formed,
in all this connection, when the first definite ques-
tion begins to glimmer upon Gray, under some
intimation, suggestion, impression, springing up
as dramatically as I can make it, as to what Horton
is really doing with him, and as to whether or no
he shall really try to find out. That question of
whether or no he shall becomes the question ; just
as the way he answers it, not all at once, but under
further impressions invoked, becomes a thing of
the liveliest interest for us ; becomes a considera-
tion the climax of which represents exactly the
Joint that is in a sense the climax of the Joints.
He sees — well what I see him see, and it is of course
not at all this act of vision in itself, but what takes
place in consequence of it, and the process of con-
frontation, reflection, resolution, that ensues —
it is this that brings me up to my high point of
beautiful difficulty and clarity. An exquisite
quality of representation here of course comes in,
with everything that is involved to make it rich
and interesting. A Joint here, a Joint of the Joint,
for perfect flexible working, is Horton's vision
of his vision, and Horton's exhibited mental,
moral audacity of certainty as to what that may
mean for himself. There is a scene of course in
which, between them, this is what it can only
be provisionally gross and approximate to call
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THE IVORY TOWER

settled : as to which I needn't insist further, it's
there ; what I want is there ; I've only to pull it
out : it's all there, heaped up and pressed together
and awaiting the properest hand. So much just
now for that.

As to Cissy Foy meanwhile, the case seems to
me to clear up and clear up to the last perfection ;
or to be destined and committed so to do, at any
rate, as one presses it with the right pressure.
How shall I put it for the moment, her case, in
the very simplest and most rudimentary terms ?
She sees the improvement in Horton's situation,
she assists at it, it gives her pleasure, it even to
a certain extent causes her wonder, but a wonder
which the pleasure only perches on, so to speak,
and converts to its use ; so does the vision appeal
to her and hold her of the exercise on his part,
the more vivid exercise than any she has yet been
able to enjoy an exhibition of, of the ability and
force, the doing and man-of-action quality, as to
the show of which he has up to now been so ham-
pered. She likes his success at last, plainly, and
he has it from her that she likes it ; she likes to
let him know that she likes it, and we have her
for the time in contemplation, as it were, of these
two beautiful cases of possession and acquisition,
out of which indeed poor little impecunious she
gets as yet no direct advantage, but which are
somehow together there for her with a kind of
glimmering looming option well before her as to

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how they shall come yet to concern her. Awfully
interesting and attractive, as one says, to mark
the point (such a Joint this !) at which the case
begins to glimmer for Gray about her, as it has
begun to glimmer for him about Horton. I make
out here, so far as I catch the tip of the tail of it,
such an interesting connection and dependence,
for what I may roughly call Gray's state of mind,
as to what is taking place within Cissy, so to speak.
Since I speak of the most primitive statement of
it possible he catches the moment at which she
begins to say to herself " But if Horton, if he, is
going to be rich— - ? " as a positive arrest, say
significant warning or omen, in his own nearer
approach to her ; which takes on thereby a por-
tentous, a kind of ominous and yet enjoyable air
of evidence as to his own likelihood, at this rate,
of getting poor. He catches her not asking herself
withal, at least then, " How is Horton going to be
rich, how, at such a rate, has it come on, and what
does it mean? "—it is only the "If Horton, oh

if ? " that he comes up against ; it's as if he

comes up against, as well, some wondrous impli-
cation in it of " If, if, if Mr. Gray is, ' in such a

funny way,' going to be poor ? " He sees

her there, seeing at the same time that it's as near
as she yet gets ; as near perhaps even — for this
splendid apprehension sort of begins to take place
in him — as she's going to allow herself to get ;
and after the first chill of it, shock of it, pain of

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it (because I want him to be at the point at which
he has that] fades a little away for him, he emerg-
ing or shaking himself out of it, the beautiful way
in which it falls into the general ironic apprehen-
sion, imagination, appropriation, of the Whole,
becomes for him the fact about it. She has them,
each on his side, there in her balance — and this
is between them, between him and her ; I must
have prepared everything right .for its being
oh such a fine moment. What I want to do of
course is to get out of this particular situation all
it can give ; what it most gives being, to the last
point, the dramatic quality, intensity, force,
current or whatever, of Gray's apprehension of
it, once this is determined, and of course wonder-
ing interest in it — as a light, so to speak, on both
of the persons concerned. What I see is that she
gives him the measure, as it were, of Morton's
successful proceeding — and does so, in a sort,
without positively having it herself, or truly want-
ing to have it beyond the fact that it is success,
is promise and prospect of acquisition on a big
scale. What it comes to is that he finds her be-
lieving in Horton just at the time and in propor-
tion as he has found himself ceasing to believe,
so far as the latter's disinterestedness is concerned.
No better, no more vivid illustration of the force
of the money-power and money-prestige rises
there before him, innumerably as other examples
assault him from all round. The effect on her

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is there for him to " study ", even, if he will ; and
in fact he does study it, studies it in a way that
(as he also sees) makes her think that this closer
consideration of her, approach to her, as it were,
is the expression of an increased sympathy, faith
and good will, increased desire, in fine, to make
her like him. All the while it is, for Gray himself,
something other ; yet something at the same time
wellnigh as absorbing as if it were what she takes
it for. The fascination of seeing what will come of
it — that is of the situation, the state of vigilance,
the wavering equilibrium, at work, or at play,
in the young woman — this " fascination " very
" amusing " to show, with everything that clusters
about it. He really enjoys getting so detached
from it as to be able to have it before him for ob-
servation and wonder as he does, and I must make
the point very much of how this fairly soothes
and relieves him, begins to glimmer upon him
exactly through that consciousness as something
like the sort of issue he has been worrying about
and longing for. Just so something that he makes
out as distinguishable there in Horton, a confidence
more or less dissimulated but also, deeply within,
more or less determined, operates in its way as a
measure for him of Horton's intimate sense of
how things will go for him ; the confidence re-
ferring, I mustn't omit, to his possibility of Cissy,
after all, whom his sentiment for makes his most
disinterested interest, so to call it : all this in a

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manner corresponding to that apprehension in
Gray of her confidence, which I have just been
sketchily noting. The one disinterested thing in
Horton, that is, consists of his being so attached
to her that he really cares for her freedom, cares
for her doing what on the whole she most wants to,
if it will but come as she wants it, by the opera-
tion, the evolution, so to say, of her clear prefer-
ence. He has somehow within him a sense that
anyway, whatever happens, they shall not fail
of being " friends " after all. I see myself wanting
to have Gray come up against some conclusive
sign of how things are at last between them —
though I say " at last " as if he has had much
other light as to how such things have been, pre-
cedently. I don't want him to have had much
other light, though he needs of course to have had
some ; there being people enough to tell him, he
being so in the circle of talk, reference, gossip ;
but with his own estimate of the truth of ever so
much of the chatter in general, and of that chatter
in particular, taking its course. What I seem to
see just in this connection is that he has " believed "
so far as to take it that she has " cared " for his
friend in the previous time, but that Horton hasn't
really at all cared for her, keeping himself in re-
serve as it is of his essence to do, and in particular
(this absolutely known to Gray) never having
wholly given up his views on Rosanna. Gray
believes that he hasn't, at any rate, and this helps

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him not to fit the fact of the younger girl's re-
nounced, quenched, outlived, passion, or what-
ever one may call it, to any game of patience or
calculation, rooted in a like state of feeling, on
Morton's part. I want the full effect of what I
can only call for convenience Gray's Discovery,
his full discovery of them "together", in some
situation, and its illuminating and signifying,
its in a high degree, to repeat again my cherished
word, determinant character. This effect requires
exactly what I have been roughly marking — the
line of argument in which appearances, as inter-
preted for himself, have been supporting Gray.
" She has been in love with him, yes — but nothing-
has come of it — nothing could come of it ; because,
though he has been aware, and has been nice and
kind to her, he isn't affected in the same way — is,
in these matters, too cool and calculating a bird.
He likes women, yes ; and has had lots to do with
them ; but in the way of what a real relation with
her would have meant — not ! She has given him
up, she has given it up — whereby one is free not
to wrorry, not to have scruples, not to fear to cut
across the possibility of one's friend." That's a
little compendium of what I see. But it comes
to me that I also want something more — for the
full effect and the exact particular and most pointed
bearing of what I dub Gray's discovery. He must
have put it to Horton, as their relations have
permitted at some suggested hour, or in some

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THE IVORY TOWER

relevant connection : "Do you mind telling me
if it's true — what I've heard a good deal affirmed
— that there has been a question of an engage-
ment between you and Miss Foy ? — or that you
are so interested in her that to see somebody else
making up to her would be to you as a pang, an
affront, a ground of contention or challenge or
whatever ? " I seem to see that, very much indeed ;
and by the same token to see Horton's straight
denegation. I see Horton say emphatically No
— and this for reasons quite conceivable in him,
once one apprehends their connection with his
wishing above all, beyond anything else that he
at this moment wishes, to keep well with Gray.
His denegation is plausible ; Gray believes it and
accepts it — all the more that at the moment in
question he wants to, in the interest of his own
freedom of action. Accordingly the point I make
is that when he in particular conditions finds them
all unexpectedly and unmistakably "together",
the discovery becomes for him doubly illuminating.
I might even better say trebly ; showing him in
the very first place that Horton has lied to him,
and thereby that Horton can lie. This very inter-
esting and important — but also, in a strange way,
" fascinating " to him. It shows in the second
way how much Cissy is " thinking " of Horton,
as well as he of her ; and it shows in the last place,
which makes it triple, how well Horton must think
of the way his affairs are getting on that he can

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now consider the possibility of a marriage — that
he can feel, I mean, he can afford to marry ; not
having need of one of the Rosannas to make up
for his own destitution. This clinches enormously,
as by a flash of vision, Gray's perception of what
he is about ; and is thus very intensely a Joint
of the first water ! What I want to be carried
on to is the point at which all that he sees and
feels and puts together in this connection eventu-
ates in a decision or attitude, in a clearing-up of
all the troubled questions, obscurities and diffi-
culties that have hung for him about what I
call his Solution, about what he shall be most
at ease, most clear and consistent for himself, in
making up his mind to. The process here and the
position on his part, with all the implications
and consequences of the same in which it results,
is difficult and delicate to formulate, but I see with
the last intensity the sense of it, and feel how it
will all come and come as I get nearer to it. What
is a big and beautiful challenge to a whole fine
handling of these connections in particular is the
making conceivable and clear, or in other words
credible, consistent, vivid and interesting, the
particular extraordinary relation thus constituted
between the two men. That one may make it
these things for Gray is more or less calculable,
and, as I seem to make out, workable ; but the
greatest beauty of the difficulty is in getting it
and keeping it in the right note and at the right

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pitch for Horton. Morton's " acceptance " — on
what prodigious basis save the straight and practi-
cal view of Gray's exalted queerness and con-
stitutional, or whatever, perversity, can that be
shown as resting ? Two fine things — that is one
of them strikes me as very fine — here come to me ;
one of these my seeing (don't I see it ?) how it will
fall in, not to say fall out, as of the essence of the
true workability, that the extent to which i's are
not dotted between them, are left consciously
undotted, to which, to the most extraordinary
tune, and yet with the logic of it all straight,
they stand off, or rather Gray does, the other all
demonstrably thus taking his cue — the way, I
say, in which the standing-off from sharp or
supreme clearances is, and confirms itself as being,
a note of my hero's action in the matter, throws
upon one the most interesting work. Horton
accepts it as exactly part of the prodigious queer-
ness which he humours and humours in propor-
tion as Gray will have it that he shall ; the " fine
thing", the second of the two, just spoken of,
being that Horton never flinches from his perfectly
splendid theory that he is " taking care ", consum-
mately, of his friend, and that he is arranging, by
my exhibition of him, just as consummately to
show for so doing. No end, I think, to be got out
of this wondrous fact of Gray's sparing Horton, or
saving him, the putting of anything to a real and
direct Test ; such a Test as would reside in his

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asking straight for a large sum of money, a big
amount, really consonant with his theoretically
intact resources and such as he with the highest
propriety in the world might simply say that he
has an immediate use for, or can make some im-
portant application of. No end, no end, as I say,
to what I see as given me by this — this huge con-
stituted and accepted eccentricity of Gray's hold-
ings-off. I have the image of the relation between
them made by it in my vision thus of the way,
or the ways, m they look at each other even while
talking together to a tune which would logically
or consistently make these ways other ; the sort
of education of the look that it breeds in Horton
on the whole ground of " how far he may go."
The things that pass between them after this
fashion quite beautiful to do if kept from an over-
doing ; with Horton's formula of his " looking
after " Gray completely interwoven with his
whole ostensibility. It is with this formula that
Horton meets the world all the while — the world
that at a given moment can only find itself so full
of wonderment and comment. It is with it above
all that he meets Cissy, who takes it from him
in a way that absolutely helps him to keep it up ;
and it would be with it that he should meet
Rosanna if, after a given day or season, he might
find it in him to dare, as it were, to " meet "
Rosanna at all. It is with Horton's formula,
which I think I finally show him as quite publicly

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delighting in, that Gray himself meets Rosanna,
whom he meets a great deal all this time ; with
such passages between them as are only matched
in another sense, and with all the other values
with which they swell, so to speak, by his passages
with the consummate Horton. Charming, by which
I mean such interesting, things resident in what
I there touch on ; with the way they look at each
other, Rosanna and Gray, if one is talking about
looks. Gray keeps it in comedy, so far as he can
— making a tone, a spell, that Rosanna doesn't
break into, as she breaks, anything to call really
breaks, into nothing as yet : I seem to see the
final, from-far-back-prepared moment when she
does, for the first and last time, break as of a big
and beautiful value. That will be a Joint of Joints ;
but meanwhile what is between them is the sombre
confidence, tenderness, fascination, anxiety, a
dozen admirable things, with which she waits on
Gray's tone, not playing up to it at all (playings-
up and suchlike not being verily in her) but taking
it from him, accommodating herself to it with all
her anxiety and her confidence somehow mixed
together, as if to see how far it will carry her.
Such a lot to be done with Gussie Bradham, por-
tentous woman, even to the very cracking or
bursting of the mould meanwhile — so functional
do I see her, in spite of the crowding and pressing
together of functions, as to the production of those
(after all early-determined) reactions in Gray by

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the simple complete exhibition of her type and
pressure and aggressive mass. She is really worth
a book by herself, or would be should I look that
way ; and I just here squeeze what I most want
about her into a sort of nutshell by saying that
it marks for Gray just where and how his Solution,
or at any rate some of its significant and attendant
aspects, swims into his ken, with the very first
scene she makes him about the meanness then of
his conception of his opportunity. Then it is he
feels he must be getting a bit into the truth of
things — if that's the way he strikes her. His very
measure of taste and delicacy and the sympathetic
and the nice and the what he wants, becomes
after a fashion what she will want most to make
him a scene about. I have it at first that he lends
himself, that her great driving tone and pressure,
her would-be act of possession of him, Cissy and
the question of Cissy being the link, have amounted
to a sort of trouble-saving thing which he has let
himself "go to", which he has suffered as his con-
venient push or handy determinant, for the hour
(sceptical even then as to its lasting) — but which
has inordinately overdosed him, overhustled him,
almost, as he feels in his old habit of financial
contraction, overspent and overruined him. He
does the things, the social things, for the moment,
that she prescribes, that she foists upon him as
the least ones he can decently do ; does them
even with a certain bewildered amusement —

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while Rosanna, brooding apart, so to speak, out
of the circle and on her own ground, but ever so
attentive, draws his eye to the effect of what one
might almost call the intelligent, the patience-
inviting, wink ! Oh for the pity of scant space
for specific illustration of Mrs. Bradham ; where-
with indeed of course I reflect on the degree to
which my planned compactness, absolutely precious
and not to be compromised with, must restrict
altogether the larger illustrational play. Intensities
of foreshortening, with alternate vividnesses of
extension : that is the rough label of the process.
I keep it before me how mixed Cissy is with certain
of the consequences of this hustlement of Mrs.
Bradham, and how bullyingly, so to call it almost,
she has put the whole matter of what he ought
to "do for them all," on the ground in particular
of what it is so open to him, so indicated for him,
to do for that poor dear exquisite thing in especial.
Illustrational, illustrational, yes ; but oh how every
inch of it will have to count. I seem to want
her to have made him do some one rather gross
big thing above all, as against his own sense of
fineness in these matters ; and to have this thing
count somehow very much in the matter of his
relation with Cissy. I seem to want something
like his having consented to be " put up " by her
to the idea of offering Cissy something very hand-
some by way of a kind " tribute to her mingled
poverty and charm — jolly, jolly, I think I've

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exactly got it ! I keep in mind that Mrs. Bradham
wants him to marry her — this amount of " dis-
interestedness " giving the measure of Mrs. B.
at her most exalted " best ". Wherewith, to con-
solidate this, her delicacy being capable — well,
of what we shall see, she works of course to ex-
aggeration the idea of his " recognising " how
nice Cissy was, over there in the other time, to
his poor sick stepfather, who himself so recognised
it, who wrote to her so charmingly a couple of
times "about it", after her return to America
and quite shortly before his death. Gray " knows
about this ", and of course will quite see what she
means. Therefore wouldn't it be nice for Gray
to give her, Cissy, something really beautiful and
valuable and socially helpful to her — as of course
he can't give her money, which is what would be
most helpful. Under this hustlement, in fine,
and with a sense, born of his goodnature, his
imagination, and his own delicacy, such a very
different affair, of what Gussie Bradham has done
for him, by her showing, he finds himself in for
having bought a very rare single row of pearls,
such as a girl, in New York at least, may happily
wear, and presenting it to our young person as
the token of recognition that Mrs. Bradham has
imagined for them. The beauty in which, I see,
is that it may be illustrational in more ways than
one — illustrational of the hustle, of the length
Gray has " appreciatively " let himself go, and,

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above all, of Cissy's really interesting intelli-
gence and "subtlety". She refuses the gift, very
gently and pleadingly, but as it seems to him
really pretty well finally — refuses it as not relevant
or proportionate or congruous to any relation
in which they yet stand to each other, and as oh
ever so much overexpressing any niceness she
may have shown in Europe. She does, in doing
this, exactly what he has felt at the back of his
head that she would really do, and what he likes
her for doing — the effect of which is that she has
furthered her interest with him decidedly more
(as she of course says to herself) than if she had
taken it. He is left with it for the moment on
his hands, and what I want is that he shall the
next thing find himself, in revulsion, in reaction,
there being for him no question of selling it again
etc., finds himself, I say, offering it to Mrs. Brad-
ham herself, who swallows it without winking.
Yet, in a way, this little history of the pearls, of
her not having had them, and of his after a fashion
owing her a certain compensation for that, owing
her something she can accept, is there between
him and my young person. They figure again
between them, humorously, freely, ironically — the
girl being of an irony ! — in their appearances on
Mrs. Bradham's person, to whose huge possession
of ornament they none the less conspicuously
add.

But my point here is above all that Gray exactly
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doesn't put the question of what is becoming of
his funds under Horty's care of them to the test
by any cultivation of that courage for large drafts
and big hauls, that nerve for believing in the fairy-
tale of his sudden fact of possession, which was
briefly and in a manner amusingly possible to
him at the first go off of his situation. He for-
bears, abstains, stands off, and finds himself, or
in particular is found by others, to the extent of
their observing, wondering and presently challeng-
ing him, to be living, to be drawing on his supposed
income, with what might pass for the most extra-
ordinarily timorous and limited imagination. He
likes this arrest, enjoys it and feels a sort of won-
drous refreshing decency, at any rate above all
a refreshing interest and curiosity about it, or,
rather, for it ; but what his position involves is
his explaining it to others, his making up his mind,
his having to, for a line to take about it, without
his thereby giving Horton away. He isn't to
give Horton away the least scrap from this point
on ; but at the same time he is to have to deal
with the world, with society, with the entourage
consisting for him, in its most pressing form, of, say,
three representative persons — he has to deal with
this challenge, as I have called it, in some way that
will sort of meet it without givings-away. These
three persons are in especial Rosanna and the two
Bradhams ; and it is before me definitely, I think,
that I want to express, and in the very vividest
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way, his sense of his situation here, of what it
means, and of what he means, in it, through what
takes place for him about it with Rosanna and
with the Bradhams. It is by what he " says "
to the Bradhams and to Rosanna (in the way,
that is largely, of not saying) that I seem to see
my values here as best got, and the presentation
of their different states most vivified and drama-
tised. These are scenes, and the function of them
to serve up for us exactly, and ever so lucidly,
what I desire them to represent. If the greatest
interest of them, of sorts, belongs to them in so
far as they are " with " Rosanna, there are yet
particular values that belong to the relation with
Davey, and the three relations, at any rate, work
the thing for me. They are perfectly different,
on this lively ground, though the " point " in-
volved is the same in each ; and the having each
of them to do it with should enable me to do it
beautifully ; I mean to squeeze all the dramatic
sense from it. The great beauty is of course for
the aspects with Rosanna, between whom and
him everything passes — and there is so much
basis already in what has been between them —
without his "explaining", as I have called it,
anything. Even without explanations — or all
the more by reason of their very absence — there
is so much of it all ; of the question and the
dramatic illumination. With Gussie Bradham —
that aspect I needn't linger or insist on, here, so

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much as a scrap. 1 have that, see it all, it's there.
But with Davey I want something very good,
that is in other words very functional ; and I
think I even wonder if I don't want to see Davey
as attempting to borrow money of him. This
— if I do see it — will take much putting on the
right basis ; and it seems to kind of glimmer
upon me richly what the right basis is. My idea
has been from the first that the Bradham money
is all Gussie's ; I have seen Davey, by the very
type and aspect, by all his detached irony and
humour and indiscretion and general value as the
unmoneyed young man who has married the heir-
ess, as Horton would have been had he been able
to marry Rosanna. But no interfering analogy
need trouble me here ; Morton's not having done
that, and the essential difference between the
men, eases off any such question. Only don't I
seem to want it that Gussie's fortune, besides
not having been even remotely comparable to
Rosanna's, is, though with a fair outward face,
a dilapidated and undermined quantity, much
ravaged by Gussie's violent strain upon it, and
representing thus, through her general enormous
habit and attitude, an association and connection
with the money world, but all the more character-
istically so, for Gray as he begins to see, that
almost everything but the pitch of Gussie's wants
and arrangements and ideals has been chucked,
as it were, out of its windows and doors. Don't

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I really see the Bradhams thus as predatory ?
Predatory on the very rich, that is ; with Gussie's
insistence that Graj^ shall be and shall proceed as
quite one of the very, oh the very, very, exactly
in order that she may so prey ? Yes and so it is
that Gray learns — so it is that a part of Davey's
abysses of New York financial history, is his own,
their own, but his in particular, abyss of incon-
venience, abyss of inability to keep it up combined
with all the social impossibility of not doing so.
I somehow want such values of the supporting and
functional and illustrative sort in Davey that I
really think I kind of want him to be the person,
the person, to whom Gray gives — as a kind of re-
cognition of the remarkable part, the precious
part, don't I feel it as being ? that Davey plays
for him. He likes so the illuminating Davey,
whom I'm quite sure I want to show in no malig-
nant or vicious light, but just as a regular rag
or sponge of saturation in the surrounding medium.
He is beyond, he is outside of, all moral judgments,
all scandalised states ; he is amused at what he
himself does, at his general and particular effect
and effects on Gray, who is his luxury of a relation,
as it were, and whom I somehow seem to want
to show him feel as the only person in the whole
medium appreciating his genius ; in other words
his detached play of mind and the deep " American
humour " of it. Don't I seem to want him even
as asking for something rather big? — a kind of a

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lump of a sum which Gray, always with amuse-
ment, answers that he will have to see about.
Gray's seeing about anything of this sort means,
all notedly, absolutely all, as I think I have it,
asking Horton whether he can, whether he may,
whether Horton will give it to him, whether in
short the thing will suit Horton ; even without
any disposition of the sum, any account of what
he wants to do, indicated or reported or confessed
to Horton ? Don't I see something like this ? —
that Gray, having put it to Horton, has precisely
determined, for his vision, on Horton's part, just
that first important plea of " Really you can't,
you know, at this rate"— even after Gray has
been for some time so " ascetic " — " It won't
be convenient for you just now ; and I must ask
you really, you know, to take my word for it that
you'd much better not distract from what I am
in the act of doing for you such a sum " — by which
I mean, for I am probably using here not the terms
Horton would use— "much better not make such
a call (call is the word) when I am exactly doing
for you etc." What I seem to see is that Davey
does have money from him, but has it only on a
scale that falls short, considerably, of his appeal
or proposal or whatever ; in other words that
Gray accommodates him to the third, or some
other fraction, of the whole extent ; and that
this involves for him practically the need of his
saying that Horton won't let him have more. I

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want that, I see it as a value ; I see Davey's aspect
on it as a value, I see what is determined thus
between them as a value ; and I seem to see most
this covering by Gray of Horton in answer to the
insinuations, not indignant but amused, in answer
to the humorously fantastic picture, on Davey's
lips, of the rate at which Horton is cleaning him
out or whatever, this taking of the line of so doing
and of piling up plausibilities of defence, excuse
etc., so far as poor Gray can be plausible in these
difficult " technical " connections, as the vivid
image, the vividest, I am most concerned to give
of what I show him as doing. The covering of
Horton, the covering of Horton — this is much
more than not giving him away ; this active and
positive protection of him seems to me really
what my subject logically asks. Well then if that
is it, is what it most of all, for the dramatic value,
asks, how can this be consistently less than Gray's
act of going all the way indeed ? I don't know
why — as it has been hovering before me — I don't
want the complete vivid sense of it to take the
form of an awful, a horrible or hideous, crisis on
Horton's part which, under the stress of it, he
" suddenly " discloses to Gray, throwing himself
upon him in the most fevered, the most desperate
appeal for relief. What then constitutes the
nature of the crisis, what then can, or constitute
the urgency of the relief, unless the fact of his
having something altogether dreadful to confess ;

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so dreadful that it can only involve the very
essence of his reputation, honour and decency,
his safety in short before the law ? He has been
guilty of some huge irregularity, say — but which
yet is a different thing from whatever irregulari-
ties he has been guilty of in respect to Gray him-
self ; and which up to now, at the worst, have
left a certain substantial part of Gray's funds
intact. Say that, say that ; turn it over, that is,
to see if it's really wanted. I think of it as wanted
because I feel the need of the effect of some acute
determination play up as I consider all this —
and yet also see objections ; which probably will
multiply as I look a little closer. I throw this off,
at all events, for the moment, as I go, to be looked
at straighter, to return to presently — after I've
got away from it a bit, I mean from this special
aspect a little, in order to come back to it fresher ;
picking up meanwhile two or three different matters.
The whole question of what my young man
has been positively interested in, been all the while
more or less definitely occupied with, I have found
myself leaving, or at any rate have left, in abey-
ance, by reason of a certain sense of its comparative
unimportance. That is I have felt my instinct
to make him definitely and frankly as complete
a case as possible of the sort of thing that will make
him an anomaly and an outsider alike in the New
York world of business, the N.Y. world of
ferocious acquisition, and the world there of enor-

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mities of expenditure and extravagance, so that the
real suppression for him of anything that shall
count in the American air as a money-making,
or even as a wage-earning, or as a pecuniarily
picking-up character, strikes me as wanted for
my emphasis of his entire difference of sensibility
and of association. I have always wanted to do
an out and out non-producer, in the ordinary
sense of non-accumulator of material gain, from
the moment one should be able to give him a
positively interested aspect on another side or in
another sense, or even definitely a generally re-
sponsive intelligence. I see my figure then in this
case as an absolutely frank example of the tra-
dition and superstition, the habit and rule so
inveterate there, frankly and serenely deviated
from — these things meaning there essentially some
mode of sharp reaching out for money over a counter
or sucking it up through a thousand contorted
channels. Yet I want something as different as
possible, no less different, I mean, from the people
who are " idle " there than from the people who
are what is called active ; in short, as I say, an
out and out case, and of course an avowedly, an
exceptionally fine and special one, which ante-
cedents and past history up to then may more
or less vividly help to account for. A very special
case indeed is of course our Young Man — without
his being which my donnee wouldn't come off
at all ; his being so is just of the very core of the

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subject. It's a question therefore of the way to
make him most special — but I so distinctly see
this that I need scarce here waste words— - !
There are three or four definite facts and considera-
tions, however ; conditions to be seen clear. I want
to steer clear of the tiresome " artistic " associa-
tions hanging about the usual type of young
Anglo-Saxon " brought up abroad " ; though
only indeed so far as they are tiresome. My idea
involves absolutely Gray's taking his stand, a bit
ruefully at first, but quite boldly when he more
and more sees what the opposite of it over there
is so much an implication of, on the acknowledg-
ment that, no, absolutely, he hasn't anything
at all to show in the way of work achieved — with
such work as he has seen achieved, whether apolo-
getically or pretentiously, as he has lived about ;
and yet has up to now not had at all the sense of
a vacuous consciousness or a so-called wasted life.
This however by reason of course of certain things,
certain ideas, possibilities, inclinations and dis-
positions, that he has cared about and felt, in his
way, the fermentation of. Of course the trouble
with him is a sort of excess of " culture ", so far
as the form taken by his existence up to then has
represented the growth of that article. Again,
however, I see that I really am in complete pos-
session of him, and that no plotting of it as to any
but one or two material particulars need here
detain me. He isn't, N.B., big, personally, by

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which I mean physically ; I see that I want him
rather below than above the middling stature,
and light and nervous and restless ; extremely
restless above all in presence of swarming new
and more or less aggressive, in fact quite assault-
ing phenomena. Of course he has had some
means— that he and his stepfather were able to
live in a quiet "European" way and on an income
of an extreme New York deplorability, is of course
of the basis of what has been before ; with which
he must have come in for whatever his late com-
panion has had to leave. So with what there was
from his mother, very modest, and what there is
from this other source, not less so, he can, he could,
go back to Europe on a sufficient basis : this fact
to be kept in mind both as mitigating the prodigy
of his climax in N.Y., and yet at the same time
as making whatever there is of " appeal " to him
over there conceivable enough. Note that the
statement he makes, when we first know him,
to his dying uncle, the completeness of the picture
of detachment then and there drawn for him, and
which, precisely, by such an extraordinary and
interesting turn, is what most " refreshes " and
works upon Mr. Betterman — note, I say, that I
absolutely require the utterness of his difference
to be a sort of virtual determinant in this relation.
He puts it so to Rosanna, tells her how extraordin-
arily he feels that this is what it has been. Heaven
forbid he should " paint " — but there glimmers

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before me the sense of the connection in which
I can see him as more or less covertly and waitingly,
fastidiously and often too sceptically, conscious
of possibilities of " writing". Quite frankly accept
for him the complication or whatever of his fastidi-
ousness, yet of his recognition withal of what
makes for sterility ; but again and again I have
all this, I have it. His "culture", his initiations
of intelligence and experience, his possibilities
of imagination, if one will, to say nothing of other
things, make for me a sort of figure of a floating
island on which he drifts and bumps and coasts
about, wanting to get alongside as much as possible,
yet always with the gap of water, the little island
fact, to be somehow bridged over. All of which
makes him, I of course desperately recognise,
another of the "intelligent", another exposed
and assaulted, active and passive " mind " en-
gaged in an adventure and interesting in itself
by so being ; but I rejoice in that aspect of my
material as dramatically and determinantly
general. It isn't centrally a drama of fools or vul-
garians ; it's only circumferentially and sur-
roundedly so — these being enormously implied
and with the effect of their hovering and pressing
upon the whole business from without, but seen
and felt by us only with that rich indirectness.
So far so good ; but I come back for a moment
to an issue left standing yesterday — and beyond
which, for that matter, two or three other points

THE IVORY TOWER

raise their heads. Why did it appear to come
up for me again — I having had it present to me
before and then rather waved it away — that one
might see Horton in the kind of crisis that I glanced
at as throwing him upon Gray with what I called
violence ? Is it because I feel " something more "
is wanted for the process by which my Young Man
works off the distaste, his distaste, for the ugli-
ness of his inheritance — something more than his
just generally playing into Morton's hands ? I
am in presence there of a beautiful difficulty,
beautiful to solve, yet which one must be to the
last point crystal-clear about ; and this difficulty
is certainly added to if Gray sees Horton as " dis-
honest " in relation to others over and above his
being " queer " in the condoned way I have so
to picture for his relation to Gray. Here are
complexities not quite easily unravelled, yet
manageable by getting sufficiently close to them ;
complexities, I mean, of the question of

whether ? Horton is abysmal, yes — but with

the mixture in it that Gray sees. Ergo I want
the mixture, and if I adopt what I threw off specu-
latively yesterday I strike myself as letting the
mixture more or less go and having the non-mix-
ture, that is the " bad " in him, preponderate.
It has been my idea that this " bad " figures in
a degree to Gray as after a fashion his own creation,
the creation, that is, of the enormous and fan-
tastic opportunity and temptation he has held out

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— even though these wouldn't have operated in
the least, or couldn't, without predispositions
in Horton's very genius. If Gray saw him as a
mere vulgar practiser of what he does practise,
the interest would by that fact exceedingly drop ;
there would be no interest indeed, and the beauty
of my " psychological " picture wouldn't come
off, would have no foot to stand on. The beauty
is in the complexity of the question — which, stated
in the simplest terms possible, reduces itself to
Horton's practically saying to Gray, or seeing
himself as saying to Gray should it come to the
absolute touch : " You mind, in your extraordinary
way, how1 this money was accumulated and hanky-
pankied, you suffer, and cultivate a suffering, from
the perpetrated wrong of which you feel it the
embodied evidence, and with which the possession
of it is thereby poisoned for you. But I don't mind
one little scrap — and there is a great deal more
to be said than you seem so much as able to under-
stand, or so much as able to want to, about the
whole question of how money comes to those
who know how to make it. Here you are then,
if it's so disagreeable to you — and what can one
really say, with the chances you give me to say
it, but that if you are so burdened and afflicted,
there are ways of relieving you which, upon my
honour, I should perfectly undertake to work —
given the facilities that you so morbidly, so
fantastically, so all but incredibly save for the

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testimony of my senses, permit me to enjoy." That,
yes ; but that is very different from the wider
range of application of the aptitudes concerned.
The confession, and the delinquency preceding
it, that played a bit up for me yesterday — what
do they do but make Horton just as vulgar as I
don't want him, and, as I immediately recognise,
Gray wouldn't in the least be able to stomach
seeing him under any continuance of relations.
I have it, I have it, and it comes as an answer
to why I worried ? Because of felt want of a way
of providing for some Big Haul, really big ; which
my situation absolutely requires. There must
be at a given moment a big haul in order to pro-
duce the big sacrifice ; the latter being of the
absolute essence. I say I have it when I ask my-
self why the Big Haul shouldn't simply consist
of the consequence of a confession made by Horton
to Gray, yes ; but made not about what he has
lost, whether dishonestly or not, for somebody
else, but what he has lost for Gray. Solutions
here bristle, positively, for the case seems to clear
up from the moment I make Horton put his matter
as a mere disastrous loss, of unwisdom, of having
been " done " by others and not as a thing in-
volving his own obliquity. What I want is that
he pleads the loss- — whether loss to Gray, loss to
another party, or loss to both, is a detail. I incline
to think loss to Gray sufficient — loss that Gray
accepts, which is different from his meeting the

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disaster inflicted on another by Horton. What
I want a bit is all contained in Gray's question,
afterwards determined, not absolutely present at
the moment, of whether this fact has not been
a feigned or simulated one, not a genuine gulf of
accident, but an appeal for relinquishment prac-
tised on Gray by the latter 's liability to believe
that the cause is genuine. I clutch the idea of this
determinant of Tightness of suspicion being one
with the circumstance that Cissy in a sort of
thereupon manner " takes up " with Horton, in-
stead of not doing so, as figures to Gray as dis-
cernible if Horton were merely minus. Is it
cleared up for Gray that the cause is not genuine ?
— does he get, or does he seek, any definite light
on this ? Does he tell any one, that is does he tell
Rosanna of the incident (though I want the thing
of proportions bigger than those of a mere
incident) — does he put it to her, in short does he
take her into his confidence about it ? I think
I see that he does to this extent, that she is the
only person to whom he speaks, but that he then
speaks with a kind of transparent and, as it were,
(as it is in her sight) " sublime " dissimulation.
Yes, I think that's the way I want it — that he
tells her what has happened, tells it to her as
having happened, as a statement of what he has
done or means to do — perhaps his mind isn't even
yet made up to it ; whereby I seem to get a very
interesting passage of drama and another very

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fine " Joint." He doesn't, no, decidedly, com-
municate anything to Davey Bradham — his in-
stinct has been against that — and I feel herewith
how much I want this D.B. relation for him to
have all its possibility of irony, "comedy",
humorous colour, so to speak. I want awfully
to do D.B. to the full and give him all his value.
However, it's of the situation here with Rosanna
that the question is, and I seem to feel that still
further clear up for me. There has been the
passage, the big circumstance, with Horton — as
to which, as to the sense of which and of what it
involves for him, don't I after all see him as taking
time ? after all see him as a bit staggered quand
meme, and, as it were, asking for time, though
without any betrayal of "suspicion", any ex-
pression tantamount to " What a queer story ! "
Yes, yes, it seems to come to me that I want the
determination of suspicion not to come at once ;
I want it to hang back and wait for a big " crystal-
lisation," a falling together of many things, which
now takes place, as it were, in Rosanna's presence
and under her extraordinary tacit action, in that
atmosphere of their relation which has already
given me, or will have given, not to speak pre-
sumptuously, so much. It kind of comes over me
even that I don't want any articulation to him-
self of the " integrity " question in respect to
Horton to have taken place at all — till it very
momentously takes place all at once in the air,

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as I say, and on the ground, and in the course,
of this present scene. Immensely interesting to
have made Everything precedent to have consisted
but in preparation for this momentousness, so
that the whole effect has been gathered there
ready to break. At the same time, if I make it
break not in the right way, unless I so rightly
condition its breaking, I do what I was moved
just above to bar, the giving away of Horton to
Rosanna in the sense that fixing his behaviour
upon him, or inviting or allowing her to fix it, is
a thing I see my finer alternative to. The great
thing, the great find, I really think, for the moment,
is this fact of his having gone to her in a sort of
still preserved uncertainty of light that amounts
virtually to darkness, and then after a time with
her coming away with the uncertainty dispelled
and the remarkable light instead taking its place.
That gives me my very form and climax — in re-
spect to the " way " that has most perplexed me,
and gathers my action up to the fulness so proposed
and desired ; to the point after which I want to
make it workable that there shall be but two
Books left. In other words the ideal will be that
this whole passage, using the word in the largest
sense, with all the accompanying aspects, shall
constitute Book 8, " Act " 8, as I call it, of my
drama, with the denoument occupying the space
to the end — for the foregoing is of course not in
the least the denoument, but only prepares it,
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just as what is thus involved is the occupancy
of Book 7 by the history with Horton. Of course
I can but reflect that to bring this splendid economy
off it must have been practised up to VII with
the most intense and immense art : the scheme
I have already sketched for I and II leaving me
therewith but III, IV, V, and VI to arrive at the
completeness of preparation for VII, which carries
in its bosom the completeness of preparation for
VIII — this last, by a like grand law, carrying in
its pocket the completeness of preparation for
IX and X. But why not ? Who's afraid ? and
what has the very essence of my design been but
the most magnificent packed and calculated
closeness ? Keep this closeness up to the notch
while admirably animating it, and I do what I
should simply be sickened to death not to ! Of
course it means the absohite exclusively economic
existence and situation of every sentence and
every letter ; but again what is that but the most
desirable of beauties in itself "? The chapters of
history with Rosanna leave me then to show,
speaking simply, its effect with regard to (I
assume I put first) Gray and Horton, to Gray and
Cissy, to Cissy and Horton, to Gray and Mrs.
Bradham on the one hand and to Gray and Davey
on the other and finally and supremely to Gray and
Rosanna herself. It is of course definitely on that
note the thing closes — but wait a little before
I come to it. Let me state as "plainly"

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as may be what " happens " as the next step in
my drama, the next Joint in the action after the
climax of the " scene " with Rosanna. Obviously
the first thing is a passage with Horton, the passage
after, which shall be a pendant to the passage
before. But don't I want some episode to inter-
pose here on the momentous ground of the Girl ?
These sequences to be absolutely planned and
fitted together, of course, up to their last point
of relation ; to work such complexity into such
compass can only be a difficulty of the most in-
spiring— the prize being, naturally, to achieve
the lucidity with the complexity. What then is
the lucidity for us about my heroine, and exactly
what is it that I want and don't want to show ?
I want something to take place here between
Gray and her that crowns his vision and his action
in respect to Horton. As I of course want every
point and comma to be " functional", so there's
nothing I want that more for than for this aspect of
my crisis — which does, yes, decidedly, present itself
before Gray has again seen Horton. I seem even
to want this aspect, as I call it, to be the decisive
thing in respect to his "decision". I want some-
thing to have still depended for him on the question
of how she is, what she does, what she makes him
see, however little intending it, of her sensibility
to the crisis, as it were — knowing as I do what
I mean by this. But what does come up for me,
and has to be faced, is all the appearance that all
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this later development that I have sketched and
am sketching, rather directly involves a deviation
from that help by alternations which I originally
counted on, and which I began by drawing upon
in the first three or four Books. What becomes
after the first three or four then of that variation —
if I make my march between IV and VIII inclusive
all a matter of what appears to Gray ? Perhaps
on closer view I can for the " finer amusement "
escape that frustration — though it would take
some doing ; and the fact remains that I don't
really want, and can't, any other exhibition than
Gray's own except in the case of Horton and the
Young Woman. I should like more variation
than just that will yield me withal— so at least
it strikes me ; but if I press a bit a possibility
perhaps will rise. Two things strike me : one of
these being that instead of making Book 9 Gray's
" act " I may make it in a manner Cissy's own ;
save that a terrific little question here comes up
as involved in the very essence of my cherished
symmetry and "unity". The absolute prime
compositional idea ruling me is thus the unity of
each Act, and I get unity with the Girl for IX
only if I keep it to her and whoever else. To her
and Horton, yes, to her and Gray (Gray first)
yes ; only how then comes in the " passage " of
Gray and Horton without her, and which I don't
want to push over to X. It would be an " aes-
thetic " ravishment to make Book 10 balance

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with Book i as Rosanna's affair ; which I glimmer-
ingly see as interestingly possible if I can wind
up somehow as I want to do between Gray and
Horton. In connection with which, however,
something again glimmers — the possibility of
making Book 9 quand meme Cissy and Horton
and Gray ; twisting out, that is, some admirable
way of her being participant in, "present at",
what here happens between them as to their own
affair. I say these things after all with the sense,
so founded on past experience, that, in closer
quarters and the intimacy of composition, pre-
noted arrangements, proportions and relations,
do most uncommonly insist on making themselves
different by shifts and variations, always im-
proving, which impose themselves as one goes
and keep the door open always to something more
right and more related. It is subject to that con-
stant possibility, all the while, that one does
pre-note and tentatively sketch ; a fact so con-
stantly before one as to make too idle any waste
of words on it. At the same time I do absolutely
and utterly want to stick, even to the very depth,
to the general distribution here imagined as I
have groped on ; and I am at least now taking
a certain lightness and conclusiveness of parts
and items for granted until the intimate tussle,
as I say, happens, if it does happen, to dislocate
or modify them. Such an assumption for instance
I find myself quite loving to make in presence

34 1

THE IVORY TOWER

of the vision quite colouring up for me yesterday
of Book 9 as given to Gray and Horton and Cissy
Together, as I may rudely express it, and Book
10, to repeat, given, with a splendid richness
and comprehensiveness, to Rosanna, as I hope
to have shown Book i as so given. Variety,
variety — I want to go in for that for all the possi-
bilities of my case may be worth ; and I see, I
feel, how a sort of fond fancy of it is met by
the distribution, the little cluster of determina-
tions, or, so to speak, for the pleasure of putting
it, determinatenesses, so noted. It gives me the
central mass of the thing for my hero's own em-
brace and makes beginning and end sort of con-
front each other over it.

Is it vain to do anything but say, that is but
feel, that this situation of the Three in Book 9
absolutely demands the intimate grip for clear-
ing itself up, working itself out ? Yes, perfectly
vain, I reflect, as at all precluding the high urgency
and decency of my seeing in advance just how
and where I plant my feet and direct my steps.
Express absolutely, to this end, the conclusive
sense, the clear firm function, of Book 9 — out of
which the rest bristles. I want it, as for that
matter I want each Book, with the last longing
and fullest intention, to be what it is " amusing "
and regaling to think of as " complete in itself " ;
otherwise a thoroughly expressed Occasion, or
as I have kept calling it Aspect, such as one can

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go at, thanks to the flow of the current in it, in
the firmest possible little narrative way. The
form of the Occasion is the form that I somehow
see as here very particularly presenting itself and
contributing its aid to that impression of the
Three Together which I try to focus. Where,
exactly, and exactly how, are they thus vividly
and workably together ? — what is the most
" amusing " way of making them so ? It is funda-
mental for me to note that my action represents
and embraces the sequences of a Year, not going
beyond this and not falling short of it. I can't
get my Unity, can't keep it, on the basis of more
than a year, and can't get my complexity, don't
want to, in anything a bit less. I see a Year right,
in fine, and it brings me round therefore to the
early summer from the time of my original Ex-
position. With which it comes to me of course
that one of the things accruing to Gray under his
Uncle's Will is the house at Newport, which be-
longed to the old man, and which I have no desire
to go into any reason whatever for his heir's having
got rid of. There is the house at Newport — as to
which it comes over me that I kind of see him in
it once or twice during the progress of the autumn's,
the winter's, the spring's events. Isn't it also a
part of my affair that I see the Bradhams with a
Newport place, and am more or less encouraged
herewith to make out the Scene of Book 9, the em-
bracing Occasion, of the three, as a " staying "

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THE IVORY TOWER

of them, in the natural \va.y, the inevitable, the
illustrative, under some roof that places them
vividly in relation to each other. Of course Mrs.
Bradham has her great characteristic house away
from N.Y., where anything and everything may
characteristically find their background — the
whole case being compatible with that lively
shakiness of fortune that I have glanced at ; only
I want to keep the whole thing, so far as my poor
little " documented " state permits, on the lines
of absolutely current New York practice, as I
further reflect I probably don't want to move
Gray an inch out of N.Y. "during the winter",
this probably a quite unnecessarily bad economy.
Having what I have of New York isn't the question
of using it, and it only, as entirely adequate from
Book 4 to 8 inclusive ? To keep everything
as like these actualities of N.Y. as possible, for
the sake of my "atmosphere", I must be wary
and wise ; in the sense for instance that said
actualities don't at all comprise people's being
at Newport early in the summer. How then,
however, came the Bradhams to be there at the
time noted in my Book I ? I reflect happily
apropos of this that my there positing the early
summer (in Book i) is a stroke that I needn't
at all now take account of ; it having been but
an accident of my small vague plan as it
glimmered to me from the very first go-off.
No, definitely, the time-scheme must a bit move

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on, and give help thereby to the place-scheme ;
if I want Gray to arrive en plein Newport, as
I do for immediate control of the assault of his
impressions, it must be a matter of August rather
than of June ; and nothing is simpler than to
shift. Let me indeed so far modify as to con-
ceive that 15 or 1 6 months will be as workable
as a Year — practically they will count as the
period both short enough and long enough; and
will bring me for Nine and Ten round to the
Newport or whatever of August, and to the what-
ever else of some moment of beauty and harmony
in the American autumn. Let me wind up on a
kind of strong October or perhaps even better
still — yes, better still — latish November, in other
words admirable Indian Summer, note. That
brings me round and makes the circle whole. Well
then I don't seem to want a repetition of Newport
— as if it were, poor old dear, the only place known
to me in the country ! — for the images that this
last suggestion causes more or less to swarm. By
the blessing of heaven I am possessed, sufficiently
to say so, of Lenox, and Lenox for the autumn
is much more characteristic too. What do I seem
to see then ? — as I don't at all want, or imagine
myself wanting at the scratch, to make a local
jump between Nine and Ten. These things come
— I see them coming now. Of course it's perfectly
conceivable, and entirely characteristic, that Mrs.
Bradham should have a place at Lenox as well

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as at Newport ; if it's necessary to posit her for
the previous summer in her own house at the
latter place. It's perfectly in order that she may
have taken one there for the summer — and that
having let the Lenox place at that time may figure
as a sort of note of the crack in her financial aspect
that is part, to call it part, of my concern. All
of which are considerations entirely meetable at
the short range — save that I do really seem to
kind of want Book 10 at Lenox and to want
Nine there by the same stroke. I should like to
stick Rosanna at the beautiful Dublin, if it weren't
for the grotesque anomaly of the name ; and after
all what need serve my purpose better than what
I already have ? It's provided for in Book i that
she and her father had only taken the house at
Newport for a couple of months or whatever ;
so that is all to the good. Oh yes, all that New
England mountain-land that I thus get by radi-
ation, and thus welcome the idea of for values
surging after a fashion upon Gray, appeals to one
to " do " a bit, even in a measure beyond one's
hope of space to do it. Well before me surely
too the fact that my whole action does, can only,
take place in the air of the last actuality ; which
supports so, and plays into, its sense and its portee.
Therefore it's a question of all the intensest
modernity of every American description ; cars
and telephones and facilities and machineries
and resources of certain sorts not to be exaggerated;

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which I can't not take account of. Assume then,
in fine, the Bradhams this second autumn at Lenox,
assume Gussie blazing away as if at the very
sincerest and validest top of her push ; assume
Rosanna as naturally there in the " summer home "
which has been her and her father's only pos-
sessional alternative to N.Y. I violate veri-
similitude in not brushing them all, all of the
N.Y. "social magnates", off to Paris as soon as
Lent sets in, by their prescribed oscillation ; but
who knows but what it will be convenient quite
exactly to shift Gussie across for the time, as
nothing then would be more in the line of truth
than to have her bustle expensively back for her
Lenox proceedings of the autumn. These things,
however, are trifles. All I have wanted to thresh
out a bit has been the " placing " of Nine and
Ten ; and for this I have more than enough
provided.

What it seems to come to then is the " positing "
of Cissy at Lenox with the Bradhams at the time
the circumstances of Book Eight have occurred ;
it's coming to me with which that I seem exactly
to want them to occur in the empty town, the
New York of a more or less torrid mid-August
— this I feel so " possessed of " ; to which Gray
has " come back " (say from Newport where he
has been for a bit alone in his own house there,
to think, as it were, with concentration) ; come
back precisely for the passage with H or ton. So

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at any rate for the moment I seem to see that ;
my actual point being, however, that Cissy is
posited at Lenox, that the Book " opens " with
her, and that it is in the sense I mean " her "
Book. She is there waiting as it were on what
Horton does, so far as I allow her intelligence
of this ; and it is there that Gray finds her on his
going on to Lenox whether under constraint (by
what has gone before) of a visit to the Bradhams,
a stay of some days with them, or under the
interest of a conceivable stay with Rosanna ; a
sort of thing that I represent, or at any rate " posit ",
as perfectly in the line of Rosanna's present free-
dom and attributes. Would I rather have him
with Rosanna and " going over " to the Brad-
hams ? would I rather have him with the Bradhams
and going over to Rosanna ? — or would I rather
have him at neither place and staying by himself
at an hotel, which seems to leave me the right
margin? There has been no staying up to this
point for him with either party, and I have as
free a hand as could be. With which there glim-
mer upon me advantages — oh yes — in placing
him in his own independence ; especially for
Book 10 : in short it seems to come. Don't I
see Cissy as having obtained from Gussie Bradham
that Horton shall be invited — which fact in itself
I here provisionally throw off as giving me perhaps
a sort of starting value.

GLASGOW I PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD-