Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/119

THE IVORY TOWER "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 assistance 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 examined and appraised as never in his life before—very much as in the exposed state of an important "piece," an object of value picked, for 105