Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/153

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 139