Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/55

THE IVORY TOWER protested. "You don't mean you're not coming on?"

She thought another instant; then her eyes overreached the long smooth interval beyond which the nondescript excrescences of Gussy's "cottage," vast and florid, and in a kindred company of hunches and gables and pinnacles confessed, even if in confused accents, to its monstrous identity. The sight itself seemed after all to give her resolution. "Yes, now for Cissy!" she said and braved the prospect.

 III

later, however, she still had this young lady before her in extended perspective and as a satisfaction, if not as an embarrassment, to come; thanks to the fact that Mrs. Bradham had forty persons, or something like it, though all casually turning up, at tea, and that she herself had perhaps never been so struck with the activity of the charming girl's response to the considerations familiar alike to all of them as Gussy's ideas about her. Gussy's ideas about her, as about everything in the world, could on occasion do more to fill the air of any scene over which Gussy presided than no matter what vociferation of any massed crowd surrounding that lady: exactly which truth might have been notable now to Rosanna in the light of Cissy's occasional clear 41