Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/307

THE IVORY TOWER in love with her under the interdict of a parity of attitude on the whole "interested" question. The woman whom he would give truly one of his limbs to commend himself to is Rosanna, who perfectly knows it and for whom he serves as the very compendium and symbol of that danger of her being approached only on that ground, the ground of her wealth, which is, by all the mistrusts and terrors it creates, the deep note of her character and situation; that he serves to her as the very type of what she most dreads, not only the victory, but the very approach of it, almost constituting thus a kind of frank relation, a kind of closeness of contact between them, that involves for her almost a sinister (or whatever) fascination. It is between him and my ambitious young woman (I call her ambitious to simplify) that they are in a manner allies in what may be called their "attitude to society"; the frankness of their recognition, on either side, that in a world of money they can't not go in for it, and that accordingly so long as neither has it, they can't go in for each other: though how each would—each makes the other feel—if it could all be only on a different basis! Horty's attitude is that he's going to have it somehow, and he to a certain extent infects her with this conviction—but that he doesn't wholly do so is exactly part of the evidence as to that latent limitation of the general trust in him which I must a good deal depend on to explain how it is that, 293