Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/176

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 something 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 sexagenarian 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