Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/288

THE IVORY TOWER rate, with her small means, in one of the smaller foreign cities, Florence or Dresden, probably the latter, and also see there Rosanna and her mother, this preceding by no long time the latter's death. Mrs. Gaw has come abroad with her daughter, for advantages, in the American way, while the husband and father is immersed in business cares at home; and when the two couples, mother and son, and mother and daughter, meet in a natural way, a connection is more or less prepared by the fact of Mr. Gaw having had the business association with Mrs. Fielder's half-brother, Mr. Betterman, at home, even though the considerably violent rupture or split between the two men will have already taken place. Mrs. Gaw is a very good simple, a bewildered and pathetic rich woman, in delicate health, and is sympathetic to Gray's mother, on whom she more or less throws herself for comfort and support, and Gray and Rosanna, Rosanna with a governess and all the facilities and accessories natural to wealth, while the boy's conditions are much leaner and plainer—the two, I say, fraternise and are good friends; he figuring to Rosanna (say he is about 13, while she is 16) as a tremendously initiated and informed little polyglot European, knowing France, Germany, Italy etc. from the first. It is at this juncture that Mrs. Fielder's second marriage has come into view, or the question and the appearance of it; and that, very simultaneously, the proposal has 274