Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/215

THE IVORY TOWER "You've got 'em already, fifty in a row"—Haughty was remorseless—"and it isn't a question of 'having': you are a façade; stretching a mile right and left. How can you not be when I'm walking up and down in front of you?"

"Oh you walk up and down, you make the things you pass, and you can behave of course if you want like one of the giants in uniform, outside the big shops, who attend the ladies in and out. In fact," Gray went on, "I don't in the least judge that I am, or can be at all advertised as, one of the really big. You seem all here so hideously rich that I needn't fear to count as extraordinary; indeed I'm very competently assured I'm by all your standards a very moderate affair. And even if I were a much greater one"—he gathered force—"my appearance of it would depend only on myself. You can have means and not be blatant; you can take up, by the very fact itself, if you happen to be decent, no more room than may suit your taste. I'll be hanged if I consent to take up an inch more than suits mine. Even though not of the truly bloated I've at least means to be quiet. Every one among us—I mean among the moneyed—isn't a monster on exhibition." In proof of which he abounded. "I know people myself who aren't."

Horton considered him with amusement, as well apparently as the people that he knew! "Of course you may dig the biggest hole in the ground 201