Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/171

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 remember 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 Neuchâtel used so to enjoin on us 157