Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/213

THE IVORY TOWER your fortune, and for the whole experience and enjoyment of it, as you can't find them elsewhere. What are you but just 'fixed' to marry, and what is the sense of your remarks but a more or less intelligent clamour for it?"

Triumphant indeed, as we have said, for lucidity and ease, was this question, and yet it had filled the air, for its moment, but to drop at once by the practical puncture of Gray's perfect recognition. "Oh of course I've thought of that—but it doesn't meet my case at all." Had he been capable of disappointment in his friend he might almost have been showing it now.

Horton had, however, no heat about it. "You mean you absolutely don't want a wife—in connection, so to speak, with your difficulties; or with the idea, that is, of their being resolved into blessings?"

"Well"—Gray was here at least all prompt and clear—"I keep down, in that matter, so much as I can any a priori or mere theoretic want. I see my possibly marrying as an effect, I mean—I somehow don't see it at all as a cause. A cause, that is"—he easily worked it out—"of my getting other things right. It may be, in conditions, the greatest rightness of all; but I want to be sure of the conditions."

"The first of which is, I understand then"—for this at least had been too logical for Haughty not to have to match it—"that you should fall so 199