Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/346

THE IVORY TOWER raise their heads. Why did it appear to come up for me again—I having had it present to me before and then rather waved it away—that one might see Horton in the kind of crisis that I glanced at as throwing him upon Gray with what I called violence? Is it because I feel "something more" is wanted for the process by which my Young Man works off the distaste, his distaste, for the ugliness of his inheritance—something more than his just generally playing into Morton's hands? I am in presence there of a beautiful difficulty, beautiful to solve, yet which one must be to the last point crystal-clear about; and this difficulty is certainly added to if Gray sees Horton as "dishonest" in relation to others over and above his being "queer" in the condoned way I have so to picture for his relation to Gray. Here are complexities not quite easily unravelled, yet manageable by getting sufficiently close to them; complexities, I mean, of the question of whether? Horton is abysmal, yes—but with the mixture in it that Gray sees. Ergo I want the mixture, and if I adopt what I threw off speculatively yesterday I strike myself as letting the mixture more or less go and having the non-mixture, that is the "bad" in him, preponderate. It has been my idea that this "bad" figures in a degree to Gray as after a fashion his own creation, the creation, that is, of the enormous and fantastic opportunity and temptation he has held out 332