Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/46

THE IVORY TOWER friend somehow helped her to do, well within her control, more and more operative. "Well, I was sixteen years old, and Gray at that time fourteen. I was huge and hideous and began then to enjoy the advantage—if advantage it was—of its seeming so ridiculous to treat the monster I had grown as negligible that I had to be treated as important. I wasn't a bit stupider than I am now—in fact I saw things much more sharply and simply and knew ever so much better what I wanted and didn't. Gray and I had become excellent friends—if you want to think of him as my 'first passion' you are welcome to, unless you want to think of him rather as my fifth! He was a charming little boy, much nicer than any I had ever seen; he didn't come up higher than my shoulder, and, to tell you all, I remember how once, in some game with a party of English and American children whom my mother had got together for Christmas, I tried to be amusing by carrying half-a-dozen of them successively on my back—all in order to have the pleasure of carrying him, whom I felt, I remember, but as a feather-weight compared with most of the others. Such a romp was I—as you can of course see I must have been, and at the same time so horridly artful; which is doubtless now not so easy for you to believe of me. But the point," Rosanna developed, "is that I entered all the way into our friends' situation and that when I was with my 32