Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/304

THE IVORY TOWER not too great, at the same time that though I want her a Girl, I want her not too young a one either. Everything about her, her intelligence, character, sense of life and knowledge of it, imply a certain experience and a certain time for that. The great fact is that she is the poor Girl, and the "exceptionally clever," in a society of the rich, living her life with them, and more or less by their bounty; being, I seem to see, already a friend and protégée of Rosanna's, though it isn't Rosanna but the Bradhams who put her in relation with Gray, whether designedly or not. I seem to run here the risk a bit of exposure to the charge of more or less repeating the figure of Charlotte in The Golden Bowl, with the Bradhams repeating even a little the Assinghams in that fiction; but I shake this reflection off, as having no weight beyond duly warning; the situation being such another affair and the real characteristics and exhibited proceedings of these three persons being likewise so other. Say something shall have passed between Cissy at a then 25, or 24 at most, and Gray "on the other side"; this a matter of but two or three occasions, interesting to him, shortly before his stepfather's death—a person with whom she has then professed herself greatly struck, to whom she has been somehow very "nice": a circumstance pleasing and touching at the time to Gray, given his great attachment to that charming, or at any rate to Gray 290