Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/122

THE IVORY TOWER 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, continued 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 108