Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/329

THE IVORY TOWER asking straight for a large sum of money, a big amount, really consonant with his theoretically intact resources and such as he with the highest propriety in the world might simply say that he has an immediate use for, or can make some important application of. No end, no end, as I say, to what I see as given me by this—this huge constituted and accepted eccentricity of Gray's holdings-off. I have the image of the relation between them made by it in my vision thus of the way, or the ways, they look at each other even while talking together to a tune which would logically or consistently make these ways other; the sort of education of the look that it breeds in Horton on the whole ground of "how far he may go." The things that pass between them after this fashion quite beautiful to do if kept from an overdoing; with Horton's formula of his "looking after" Gray completely interwoven with his whole ostensibility. It is with this formula that Horton meets the world all the while—the world that at a given moment can only find itself so full of wonderment and comment. It is with it above all that he meets Cissy, who takes it from him in a way that absolutely helps him to keep it up; and it would be with it that he should meet Rosanna if, after a given day or season, he might find it in him to dare, as it were, to "meet" Rosanna at all. It is with Horton's formula, which I think I finally show him as quite publicly 315