Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/93

THE IVORY TOWER at once," his companion had announced; and he felt it on the spot as scarce less than delicious that this element too should play, and with such fineness, into that harmony of the amusingly exotic which was, under his benediction, working its will on him. "Oh yes," she rejoined in answer to his exhibition of the degree in which what was before him did stir again to sweetness a chord of memory, "oh yes, food's a great tie, it's like language—you can always understand your own, whereas in Europe I had to learn about six others."

Miss Mumby had been to Europe, and he saw soon enough how there was nowhere one could say she hadn't gone and nothing one could say she hadn't done—one's perception could bear only on what she hadn't become; so that, as he thus perceived, though she might have affected Europe even as she was now affecting him, she was a pure negation of its having affected herself, unless perhaps by adding to her power to make him feel how little he could impose on her. She knew all about his references while he only missed hers, and that gave her a tremendous advantage—or would have done so hadn't she been too much his cousin to take it. He at any rate recognised in a moment that the so many things she had had to learn to understand over there were not forms of speech but alimentary systems—as to which view he quite agreed with her that the element of the native was equally 79