Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/314

THE IVORY TOWER It is the insistence on them, the way everyone, among that lot at any rate, appears aware of no values but those, that sets up more and more its effect on his nerves, his moral nerves as it were, and his reflective imagination. The girl counters to this of course—she isn't so crude a case as not to; she denies that she's the sort of existence that he thus imputes—all the while that she only sees in his attitude and his position a kind of distinction that would simply add to their situation, simply gild and after a fashion decorate it, were she to marry him. I want to make another Joint with her beginning, all the same, to doubt of him, to think him really perhaps capable of strange and unnatural things, which she doesn't yet see at all clearly; but which take the form for her of his possibly handing over great chunks of his money to public services and interests, deciding to be munificent with it, after the fashion of Rockefellers and their like: though with the enormous difference that his resources are not in the slightest degree of that calibre. He's rich; yes, but not rich enough to remain rich if he goes in for that sort of overdone idealism. Some passage bearing on this takes place, I can see, about at the time when he has the so to call it momentous season, or scene, or whatever, of confidence or exchange with Rosanna in which she goes the whole "figure", as they say, and puts to him that exactly her misery is in having come in for 300