Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/50

THE IVORY TOWER provide going in the least to hold out? He owes you clearly everything he has become, and how can he decently not want you should know he feels it? All's well that ends well: that at least I foresee I shall want to say when I've had more of the beginning. You were going to tell me how it was in particular that you got your pull."

She puffed and puffed again, letting her eyes once more wander and rest; after which, through her smoke, she recovered the sense of the past. "One Sunday morning we went together to the great Gallery—it had been between us for weeks that he was some day to take me and show me the things he most admired: that wasn't at all what would have been my line with him. The extent to which he was 'cleverer' than I and knew about the things I didn't, and don't know even now!" Greatly she made this point. "And yet the beauty was that I felt there were ways I could help him, all the same—I knew that even with all the things I didn't know, so that they remained ignorances of which I think I wasn't a bit ashamed: any more in fact than I am now, there being too many things else to be ashamed of. Never so much as that day, at any rate, had I felt ready for my part—yes, it came to me there as my part; for after he had called for me at our hotel and we had started together I knew something particular was the matter and that he of a sudden didn't care for what we were doing, though we 36