Gray, though releasing him, still looked at him hard—so hard perhaps that, having imagination, he might in an instant more have felt it go down too deep. It hadn't done that, however, when "What I want of you above all is exactly that you shall pick and choose" was merely what at first came of it. And the case was still all of the rightest as Graham at once added: "You see 'people' are exactly my difficulty—I'm so mortally afraid of them, and so equally sure that it's the last thing you are. If I want you for myself I want you still more for others—by which you may judge," said Gray, "that I've cut you out work."
"That you're mortally afraid of people is, I confess," Haughty answered, "news to me. I seem to remember you, on the contrary, as so remarkably and—what was it we used to call it?—so critico-analytically interested in 'em."
"That's just it—I am so beastly interested! Don't you therefore see," Gray asked, "how I may dread the complication?"
"Dread it so that you seek to work it off on another?"—and Haughty looked about as if he would after all have rather relished a cigarette.
Clearly, none the less, this awkwardness was lost on his friend. "I want to work off on you, Vinty, every blest thing that you'll let me; and when you've seen into my case a little further my reasons will so jump at your eyes that I'm convinced you'll have patience with them."
"I'm not then, you think, too beastly interested myself——? I've got such a free mind, you mean, and such a hard heart, and such a record of failure to have been any use at all to myself, that I must be just the person, it strikes you, to save you all the trouble and secure you all the enjoyment?" That inquiry Horton presently made, but with an addition ere Gray could answer. "My difficulty for myself, you see, has always been that I also am by my nature too beastly interested."
"Yes"—Gray promptly met it—"but you like it, take that easily, immensely enjoy it and are not a bit afraid of it. You carry it off and you don't pay for it."
"Don't you make anything," Horton simply went on, "of my being for instance so uncannily interested in yourself?"
Gray's eyes again sounded him. "Are you really and truly?—to the extent of its not boring you?" But with all he had even at the worst to take for granted he waited for no reassurance. "You'll be so sorry for me that I shall wring your heart and you'll assist me for common pity."
"Well," Horton returned, a natural gaiety of response not wholly kept under, "how can I absurdly make believe that pitying you, if it comes to that, won't be enough against nature to have some fascination? Endowed with every advantage, personal, physical, material, moral, in other words, brilliantly clever, inordinately rich, strikingly handsome and incredibly good, your state yet insists on being such as to nip in the bud the hardy flower of envy. What's the matter with you to bring that about would seem, I quite agree, well worth one's looking into—even if it proves, by its perversity or its folly, something of a trial to one's practical philosophy. When I pressed you some minutes ago for the reason of your not facing the future with a certain ease you gave as that reason your want of education and wit. But please understand," Horton added, "that I've no time to waste with you on sophistry that isn't so much as plausible." He stopped a moment, his hands in his pockets, his head thrown all but extravagantly back, so that his considering look might have seemed for the time to descend from a height designed a little to emphasise Gray's comparative want of stature. That young man's own eyes remained the while, none the less, unresentfully raised; to such an effect indeed that, after some duration of this exchange, the bigger man's fine irony quite visibly shaded into a still finer, and withal frankly kinder, curiosity. Poor Gray, with a strained face and an agitation but half controlled, breathed quick and hard, as from inward pressure, and then, renouncing choice—there were so many things to say—shook his head, slowly and repeatedly, after a fashion that discouraged levity. "My dear boy," said his friend under this sharper impression, "you do take it hard." Which made Graham turn away, move about in vagueness of impatience and, still panting and still hesitating for other expression, approach again, as from a blind impulse, the big chimneypiece, reach for a box that raised a presumption of cigarettes and, the next instant, thrust it out in silence at his visitor. The latter's welcome of the motion, his prompt appropriation of relief, was also mute; with which he found matches in advance of Gray's own notice of them and had a light ready, of which our young man himself partook, before the box went back to its shelf. Odd again might have been for a protected witness of this scene—which of course is exactly what you are invited to be—the lapse of speech that marked it for the several minutes. Horton, truly touched now, and to the finer issue we have glanced at, waited unmistakably for the sign of something more important than his imagination, even at its best, could give him, and which, not less conceivably, would be the sort of thing he himself hadn't signs, either actual or possible, for. He waited while they did the place at last the inevitable small violence—this being long enough to make him finally say: "Do you mean, on your honour, that you don't like what has happened to you?"