Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/310

THE IVORY TOWER little bit: Rosanna has no more taste than an elephant; Rosanna is only morally elephantine, or whatever it is that is morally most massive and magnificent. What I want is to get my right firm joints, each working on its own hinge, and forming together the play of my machine: they are the machine, and when each of them is settled and determined it will work as I want it. The first of these, definitely, is that Gray does inherit, has inherited. The next is that he is face to face with what it means to have inherited. The next to that is that one of the things it means—though this isn't the light in which he first sees the fact—is that the world immensely opens to him, and that one of the things it seems most to give him, to offer and present to him, is this brilliant, or whatever, and interesting young woman. He doesn't at first at all see her in the light of her making up to him on account of his money; she is too little of a crudely interested specimen for that, and too sincere in fact to herself—feeling very much about him that she would certainly have been drawn to him, after this making of acquaintance, even if no such advantages attached to him and he had remained what he had been up to then. But all the same it is a Joint, and we see that it is by seeing her as we shall; I mean I make it and keep it one by showing "what goes on" between herself and Horton. I have blessedly that view, that alternation of view, for my 296