Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/358

THE IVORY TOWER of them, in the natural way, the inevitable, the illustrative, under some roof that places them vividly in relation to each other. Of course Mrs. Bradham has her great characteristic house away from N.Y., where anything and everything may characteristically find their background—the whole case being compatible with that lively shakiness of fortune that I have glanced at; only I want to keep the whole thing, so far as my poor little "documented" state permits, on the lines of absolutely current New York practice, as I further reflect I probably don't want to move Gray an inch out of N.Y. "during the winter", this probably a quite unnecessarily bad economy. Having what I have of New York isn't the question of using it, and it only, as entirely adequate from Book 4 to 8 inclusive? To keep everything as like these actualities of N.Y. as possible, for the sake of my "atmosphere", I must be wary and wise; in the sense for instance that said actualities don't at all comprise people's being at Newport early in the summer. How then, however, came the Bradhams to be there at the time noted in my Book 1? I reflect happily apropos of this that my there positing the early summer (in Book 1) is a stroke that I needn't at all now take account of; it having been but an accident of my small vague plan as it glimmered to me from the very first go-off. No, definitely, the time-scheme must a bit move 344