Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/350

THE IVORY TOWER fine "Joint." He doesn't, no, decidedly, communicate anything to Davey Bradham—his instinct has been against that—and I feel herewith how much I want this D.B. relation for him to have all its possibility of irony, "comedy", humorous colour, so to speak. I want awfully to do D.B. to the full and give him all his value. However, it's of the situation here with Rosanna that the question is, and I seem to feel that still further clear up for me. There has been the passage, the big circumstance, with Horton—as to which, as to the sense of which and of what it involves for him, don't I after all see him as taking time? after all see him as a bit staggered quand même, and, as it were, asking for time, though without any betrayal of "suspicion", any expression tantamount to "What a queer story!" Yes, yes, it seems to come to me that I want the determination of suspicion not to come at once; I want it to hang back and wait for a big "crystallisation," a falling together of many things, which now takes place, as it were, in Rosanna's presence and under her extraordinary tacit action, in that atmosphere of their relation which has already given me, or will have given, not to speak presumptuously, so much. It kind of comes over me even that I don't want any articulation to himself of the "integrity" question in respect to Horton to have taken place at all—till it very momentously takes place all at once in the air, 336