Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/189

THE IVORY TOWER "whatever I can remember of Gray Fielder, but she won't listen to anything if I can't first be sure as to that. So as I want her enormously to like him, we both hang, you see, on your lips; unless you call it, more correctly, on his."

Davey's evening bloom opened to them a dense but perfectly pathless garden of possibilities; out of which, while he faced them, he left them to pluck by their own act any bright flower they sufficiently desired to reach. Wonderful during the few instants, between these flagrant worldlings, the exchange of fine recognitions. It would have been hard perhaps to say of them whether it was most discernible that Haughty and Cissy trusted most his intelligence or his indifference, and whether he most applauded or ignored the high perfection of their assurance. What was testified to all round, at all events—

"Ah then he is as 'odd' as I was sure—in spite of Haughty's perverse theory that we shall find him the flattest of the flat!" 175