Gray stood for a moment looking down, then faced his guest as with a slight effort. "Do you know about Rosanna Gaw?" And then while Horton, for reasons of his own, failed at once to answer: "She has come in or millions——"
"Twenty-two and a fraction," Haughty said at once. "Do you mean that she sits, like Truth, at the bottom of a well?" he asked still more divertedly.
Gray had a sharp gesture. "If there's a person in the world whom I don't call a façade——!"
"You don't call her one?"—Haughty took it right up. And he added as for very compassion: "My poor man, my poor man——!"
"She loathes self-exhibition; she loathes being noticed; she loathes every form of publicity." Gray quite flushed for it.
Horton went to the mantel for another cigarette, and there was that in the calm way of it that made his friend, even though helping him this time to a light, wait in silence for his word. "She does more than that"—it was brought quite dryly out. "She loathes every separate dollar she possesses."
Gray's sense of the matter, strenuous though it was, could just stare at this extravagance of assent; seeing however, on second thoughts, what there might be in it. "Well then if what I have is a molehill beside her mountain, I can the more easily emulate her in standing back."
"What you have is a molehill?" Horton was concerned to inquire.
Gray showed a shade of guilt, but faced his judge. "Well—so I gather."
The judge at this lost patience. "Am I to understand that you positively cultivate vagueness and water it with your tears?"