The Ivory Tower

by Henry James

She considered again with her far-wandering eyes; as if both moved by her impulse to confidence and weighted with the sense of how much of it there all was. "Well, in as few words as possible, it was like this. He's the son but of a half-sister, the daughter of Mr. Betterman's father by a second marriage which he in his youth hadn't at all liked, and who made her case worse with him, as time went on, by marrying a man, Graham's father, whom he had also some strong objection to. Yes," she summarized, "he seems to have been difficult to please, but he's making up for it now. His brother-in-law didn't live long to suffer from the objection, and the sister, Mrs. Fielder, left a widow badly provided for, went off with her boy, then very young, to Europe. There, later on, during a couple of years that I spent abroad with my mother, we met them and for the time saw much of them; she and my dear mother greatly took to each other, they formed the friendliest relation, and we had in common that my father's business association with Mr. Betterman still at that time subsisted, though the terrible man—as he then was—hadn't at all made it up with our friend. It was while we were with her in Dresden, however, that something happened which brought about, by correspondence, some renewal of intercourse. This was a matter on which we were in her confidence and in which we took the greatest interest, for we liked also the other person concerned in it. An opportunity had come up for her to marry again, she had practically decided to embrace it, and of this, though everything between them had broken off so short, her unforgiving brother had heard, indirectly, in New York."

Davey Bradham, lighting cigarettes, and having originally placed his case, in a manner promptly appreciated, at his companion's disposal, crowned this now adjusted relation with a pertinence of comment. "And only again of course to be as horrid as possible about it! He hated husbands in general."

"Well, he himself, it was to be said, had been but little of one. He had lost his own wife early and hadn't married again—though he was to lose early also the two children born to him. The second of these deaths was recent at the time I speak of, and had had to do, I imagine, with his sudden overture to his absent relations. He let his sister know that he had learnt her intention and thought very ill of it, but also that if she would get rid of her low foreigner and come back with the boy he would be happy to see what could be done for them."

"What a jolly situation!"—Davey exhaled fine puffs. "Her second choice then—at Dresden—was a German adventurer?"

"No, an English one, Mr. Northover; an adventurer only as a man in love is always one, I suppose, and who was there for us to see and extremely to approve. He had nothing to do with Dresden beyond having come on to join her; they had met elsewhere, in Switzerland or the Tyrol, and he had shown an interest in her, and had made his own impression, from the first. She answered her brother that his demand of her was excessive in the absence of anything she could recognise that she owed him. To this he replied that she might marry then whom she liked, but that if she would give up her boy and send him home, where he would take charge of him and bring him up to prospects she would be a fool not to appreciate, there need be no more talk and she could lead her life as she perversely preferred. This crisis came up during our winter with her—it was a very cruel one, and my mother, as I have said, was all in her confidence."

"Of course"—Davey Bradham abounded; "and you were all in your mother's!"

Rosanna leaned back on the bench, her cigarette between her strong and rounded fingers; she sat at her ease now, this chapter of history filling, under her view, the soft lap of space and the comfort of having it well out, and yet of keeping it, as her friend somehow helped her to do, well within her control, more and more operative. "Well, I was sixteen years old, and Gray at that time fourteen. I was huge and hideous and began then to enjoy the advantage—if advantage it was—of its seeming so ridiculous to treat the monster I had grown as negligible that I had to be treated as important. I wasn't a bit stupider than I am now—in fact I saw things much more sharply and simply and knew ever so much better what I wanted and didn't. Gray and I had become excellent friends—if you want to think of him as my 'first passion' you are welcome to, unless you want to think of him rather as my fifth! He was a charming little boy, much nicer than any I had ever seen; he didn't come up higher than my shoulder, and, to tell you all, I remember how once, in some game with a party of English and American children whom my mother had got together for Christmas, I tried to be amusing by carrying half-a-dozen of them successively on my back—all in order to have the pleasure of carrying him, whom I felt, I remember, but as a featherweight compared with most of the others. Such a romp was I—as you can of course see I must have been, and at the same time so horridly artful; which is doubtless now not so easy for you to believe of me. But the point," Rosanna developed, "is that I entered all the way into our friends' situation and that when I was with my mother alone we talked for the time of nothing else. The strange, or at least the certain, thing was that though we should have liked so to have them over here, we hated to see them hustled even by a rich relative: we were rich ourselves, though we rather hated that too, and there was no romance for us in being so stuffed up. We liked Mr. Northover, their so devoted friend, we saw how they cared for him, how even Graham did, and what an interest he took in the boy, for whom we felt that a happy association with him, each of them so open to it, would be a great thing; we threw ourselves in short, and I dare say to extravagance, into the idea of the success of Mr. Northover's suit. She was the charmingest little woman, very pretty, very lonely, very vague, but very sympathetic, and we perfectly understood that the pleasant Englishman, of great taste and thoroughly a gentleman, should have felt encouraged. We didn't in the least adore Mr. Betterman, between whom and my father the differences that afterwards became so bad were already threatening, and when I saw for myself how the life that might thus be opened to him where they were, with his mother's marriage and a further good influence crowning it, would compare with the awful game of grab, to express it mildly, for which I was sure his uncle proposed to train him, I took upon myself to get more roused and wound-up than I had doubtless any real right to, and to wonder what I might really do to promote the benefit that struck me as the greater and defeat the one against which my prejudice was strong."

She had drawn up a moment as if what was to come required her to gather herself, while her companion seemed to assure her by the backward set of his head, that of a man drinking at a cool spout, how little his attention had lapsed. "I see at once, you dear grand creature, that you were from that moment at the bottom of everything that was to happen; and without knowing yet what these things were I back you for it now up to the hilt."

"Well," she said, "I'm much obliged, and you're never for an instant, mind, to fail me; but I needed no backing then—I didn't even need my mother's: I took on myself so much from the moment my chance turned up."

"You just walked in and settled the whole question, of course." He quite flaunted the luxury of his interest. "Clearly what moved you was one of those crowning passions of infancy."