Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/56

THE IVORY TOWER smile at her, always as yet from a distance, during lapses of intervals and across shifting barriers of the more or less eminent and brilliant. Mrs. Bradham's great idea—notoriously the most disinterested Gussy had been known, through a career rich in announced intentions and glorious designs, to entertain with any coherence—was that by placing and keeping on exhibition, under her eye, the loveliest flower of girlhood a splendid and confident society could have wished to wear on its bosom she should at once signally enhance the dignity of the social part played by herself and steep the precious object in a medium in which the care of precious objects was supremely understood. "When she does so much for me what in the world mustn't I do for her?" Cecilia Foy had put that to Rosanna again and again with perfect lucidity, making her sense of fair play shine out of it and her cultivation of that ideal form perhaps not the least of the complications under which our elder young woman, earnest in everything, endeavoured to stick to the just view of her. Cissy had from the first appealed to her with restrictions, but that was the way in which for poor brooding Rosanna every one appealed; only there was in the present case the difference that whereas in most cases the appeal, or rather her view of it, found itself somehow smothered in the attendant wrong possibilities, the interest of this bright victim of Mrs. Bradham's furtherance worked 42