Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/342

THE IVORY TOWER of expenditure and extravagance, so that the real suppression for him of anything that shall count in the American air as a money-making, or even as a wage-earning, or as a pecuniarily picking-up character, strikes me as wanted for my emphasis of his entire difference of sensibility and of association. I have always wanted to do an out and out non-producer, in the ordinary sense of non-accumulator of material gain, from the moment one should be able to give him a positively interested aspect on another side or in another sense, or even definitely a generally responsive intelligence. I see my figure then in this case as an absolutely frank example of the tradition and superstition, the habit and rule so inveterate there, frankly and serenely deviated from—these things meaning there essentially some mode of sharp reaching out for money over a counter or sucking it up through a thousand contorted channels. Yet I want something as different as possible, no less different, I mean, from the people who are "idle" there than from the people who are what is called active; in short, as I say, an out and out case, and of course an avowedly, an exceptionally fine and special one, which antecedents and past history up to then may more or less vividly help to account for. A very special case indeed is of course our Young Man—without his being which my donnée wouldn't come off at all; his being so is just of the very core of the 328