Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/210

THE IVORY TOWER move about in vagueness of impatience and, still panting and still hesitating for other expression, approach again, as from a blind impulse, the big chimney-piece, reach for a box that raised a presumption of cigarettes and, the next instant, thrust it out in silence at his visitor. The latter's welcome of the motion, his prompt appropriation of relief, was also mute; with which he found matches in advance of Gray's own notice of them and had a light ready, of which our young man himself partook, before the box went back to its shelf. Odd again might have been for a protected witness of this scene—which of course is exactly what you are invited to be—the lapse of speech that marked it for the several minutes. Horton, truly touched now, and to the finer issue we have glanced at, waited unmistakably for the sign of something more important than his imagination, even at its best, could give him, and which, not less conceivably, would be the sort of thing he himself hadn't signs, either actual or possible, for. He waited while they did the place at last the inevitable small violence—this being long enough to make him finally say: "Do you mean, on your honour, that you don't like what has happened to you?"

This unloosed then for Gray the gate of possible expression. "Of course I like it—that is of course I try to. I've been trying here, day after day, as hard as ever a decent man can have tried for 196