Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/299

THE IVORY TOWER this part of the action, the situation so created and its consequences. Enormous difficulty of pretending to show various things here as with a business vision, in my total absence of business initiation; so that of course my idea has been from the first not to show them with a business vision, but in some other way altogether; this will take much threshing out, but it is the very basis of the matter, the core of the subject, and I shall worry it through with patience. But I must get it, plan it, utterly right in advance, and this is what takes the doing. The other doing, the use of it when schemed, is comparatively easy. What strikes me first of all is that the amount of money that Gray comes in for must, for reasons I needn't waste time in stating, so obvious are they, be no such huge one, by the New York measure, as in many another case: it's a tremendous lot of money for Gray, from his point of view and in relation to his needs or experience. Thus the case is that if Mr. Gaw's accumulations or whatever have distinctly surpassed expectation, the other old man's have fallen much below it—or at least have been known to be no such great affair anyhow. Various questions come up for me here, though there is no impossibility of settling them if taken one by one. The whole point is of course that Mr. Betterman has been a ruthless operator or whatever, and with doings Davey Bradham is able to give Gray so dark an account 285