"You mean because you couldn't make her believe it?" asked Cissy after taking this in.
"No—not that, for I didn't so much as try. I didn't—and it was awfully superior of me, you know—approach her at all on that basis. That," said Horton, "is where it cuts. The basis was that of my own capacity only—my capacity to serve her, in every particular, with every aptitude I possess in the world, and which I could see she saw I possess (it was given me somehow to send that home to her!) without a hair's breadth overlooked. I shouldn't have minded her taking me so for impossible, blackly impossible, if she had done it under an illusion; but she really believed in me as a general value, quite a first-rate value—that I stood there and didn't doubt. And yet she practically said 'You ass!'"
His encircling arm gained, for response to this, however, but the vibration of her headshake—without so much as any shudder at the pain he so vividly imaged. "She practically said that she was already then in love with Mr. Graham, and you wouldn't have had a better chance had a passion of your own stuck out of you. If I thought she didn't admire you," Cissy said, "I shouldn't be able to do with her at all—it would be too stupid of her; putting aside her not accepting you, I mean—for a woman can't accept every man she admires. I suppose you don't at present object," she continued, "to her admiring Mr. Graham enough to account for anything; especially as it accounts so for her having just acted on his behalf with such extraordinary success. Doesn't that make it out for him," she asked, "that he's admired by twenty millions plus the amount that her reconciliation of him with his uncle just in time to save it, without an hour to spare, will represent for his pocket? We don't know what that lucky amount may be——"
"No, but we more or less shall"—Horton took her straight up. "Of course, without exaggeration, that will be interesting—even though it will be but a question, I'm quite certain, of comparatively small things. Old Betterman—there are people who practically know, and I've talked with them—isn't going to foot up to any faint likeness of what Gaw does. That, however, has nothing to do with it: all that is relevant—since I quite allow that, speculation for speculation, our association in this sort represents finer fun than it has yet succeeded in doing in other sorts—all that's relevant is that when you've seen Gray you mayn't be in such a hurry to figure him as a provoker of insatiable passions. Your insidious Northover has, as you say, worked you up, but wait a little to see if the reality corresponds."
"He showed me a photograph, my insidious Northover," Cissy promptly recalled; "he was naïf enough, poor dear, for that. In fact he made me a present of several, including one of himself; I owe him as well two or three other mementos, all of which I've cherished."
"What was he up to anyway, the old corrupter of your youth?"—Horton seemed really to wonder. "Unless it was that you simply reduced him to infatuated babble."
"Well, there are the photographs and things to show," she answered unembarrassed—"though I haven't them with me here; they're put away in New York. His portrait's extremely good-looking."
"Do you mean Mr. Northover's own?"
"Oh his is of course quite beautiful. But I mean Mr. Fielder's—at his then lovely age. I remember it," said Cissy, "as a nice, nice face."
Haughty on his side indulged in the act of memory, concluding after an instant to a head-shake. "He isn't at all remarkable for looks; but putting his nice face at its best, granting that he has a high degree of that advantage, do you see Rosanna so carried away by it as to cast everything to the winds for him?"