The Ivory Tower

by Henry James

"It's really worth one's coming so far, uncle, if you don't mind my saying so—it's really worth a great pilgrimage to see anything so splendid."

The old man heard, clearly, as by some process that was still deeply active; and then after a pause that represented, Gray was sure, no failure at all of perception, but only the wide embrace of a possibility of pleasure, sounded bravely back: "Does it come up to what you've seen?"

It was Gray rather who was for a moment mystified—though only to further spontaneity when he had caught the sense of the question. "Oh, you come up to everything—by which I mean, if I may, that nothing comes up to you! I mean, if I may," he smiled, "that you yourself, uncle, affect me as the biggest and most native American impression that I can possibly be exposed to."

"Well," said Mr. Betterman, and again as with a fond deliberation, "what I'm going to like, I see, is to listen to the way you talk. That," he added with his soft distinctness, a singleness of note somehow for the many things meant, "that, I guess, is about what I most wanted you to come for. Unless it be to look at you too. I like to look right at you."

"Well," Gray harmoniously laughed again, "if even that can give you pleasure——!" He stood as for inspection, easily awkward, pleasantly loose, holding up his head as if to make the most of no great stature. "I've never been so sorry that there isn't more of me."

The fine old eyes on the pillow kept steadily taking him in; he could quite see that he happened to be, as he might have called it, right; and though he had never felt himself, within his years, extraordinarily or excitingly wrong, so that this felicity might have turned rather flat for him, there was still matter for emotion, for the immediate throb and thrill, in finding success so crown him. He had been spared, thank goodness, any positive shame, but had never known his brow brushed or so much as tickled by the laurel or the bay. "Does it mean," he might have murmured to himself, "the strangest shift of standards?"—but his uncle had meanwhile spoken. "Well, there's all of you I'm going to want. And there must be more of you than I see. Because you are different," Mr. Betterman considered.

"But different from what?" Truly was Gray interested to know.

It took Mr. Betterman a moment to say, but he seemed to convey that it might have been guessed. "From what you'd have been if you had come."

The young man was indeed drawn in. "If I had come years ago? Well, perhaps," he so far happily agreed—"for I've often thought of that myself. Only, you see," he laughed, "I'm different from that too. I mean from what I was when I didn't come."

Mr. Betterman looked at it quietly. "You're different in the sense that you're older—and you seem to me rather older than I supposed. All the better, all the better," he continued to make out. "You're the same person I didn't tempt, the same person I couldn't—that time when I tried. I see you are, I see what you are."