Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/182

THE IVORY TOWER Haughty on his side indulged in the act of memory, concluding after an instant to a headshake. "He isn't at all remarkable for looks; but putting his nice face at its best, granting that he has a high degree of that advantage, do you see Rosanna so carried away by it as to cast everything to the winds for him?"

Cissy weighed the question. "We've seen surely what she has been carried away enough to do."

"She has had other reasons—independent of headlong passion. And remember," he further argued—"if you impute to her a high degree of that sort of sensibility—how perfectly proof she was to my physical attractions, which I declare to you without scruple leave the very brightest you may discover in Gray completely in the shade."

Again his companion considered. "Of course you're dazzlingly handsome; but are you, my dear, after all—I mean in appearance—so very interesting?"

The inquiry was so sincere that it could be met but in the same spirit. "Didn't you then find me so from the first minute you ever looked at me?"

"We're not talking of me," she returned, "but of people who happen to have been subjects less predestined and victims less abject. What," she then at once went on, "is Gray's appearance, 'anyway'? Is he black, to begin with, or white, 168