Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/328

THE IVORY TOWER pitch for Horton. Horton's "acceptance"—on what prodigious basis save the straight and practical view of Gray's exalted queerness and constitutional, or whatever, perversity, can that be shown as resting? Two fine things—that is one of them strikes me as very fine—here come to me; one of these my seeing (don't I see it?) how it will fall in, not to say fall out, as of the essence of the true workability, that the extent to which i's are not dotted between them, are left consciously undotted, to which, to the most extraordinary tune, and yet with the logic of it all straight, they stand off, or rather Gray does, the other all demonstrably thus taking his cue—the way, I say, in which the standing-off from sharp or supreme clearances is, and confirms itself as being, a note of my hero's action in the matter, throws upon one the most interesting work. Horton accepts it as exactly part of the prodigious queerness which he humours and humours in proportion as Gray will have it that he shall; the "fine thing", the second of the two, just spoken of, being that Horton never flinches from his perfectly splendid theory that he is "taking care", consummately, of his friend, and that he is arranging, by my exhibition of him, just as consummately to show for so doing. No end, I think, to be got out of this wondrous fact of Gray's sparing Horton, or saving him, the putting of anything to a real and direct Test; such a Test as would reside in his 314