Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/89

THE IVORY TOWER his uncle done but cause to be conveyed to him across the sea the bare wish that he should come? He had straightway come in consequence, but on no explanation and for no signified reward; he had come simply to avoid a possible ugliness in his not coming. Generally addicted to such avoidances, to which it indeed seemed to him that the quest of beauty was too often reduced, he had found his reason sufficient until the present hour, when it was as if all reasons, all of his own at least, had suddenly abandoned him, to the effect of his being surrounded only with those of others, of which he was up to now ignorant, but which somehow hung about the large still place, somehow stiffened the vague summer Sunday and twinkled in the universal cleanness, a real revelation to him of that possible immunity in things. He might have been sent for merely to be blown up for the relief of the old man's mind on the perversity and futility of his past. There was before him at all events no gage of anything else, no intimation other than his having been, materially speaking, preceded by preparations, to make him throw himself on a survey of prospects. What was before him at the least was a "big" experience—even to have come but to be cursed and dismissed would really be a bigger thing than yet had befallen him. Not the form but the fact of the experience accordingly mattered—so that wasn't it there to a fine intensity by his standing ever and anon at the closed door 75