how he might have led his life and "turned out," if he had not so, at the
outset, given it up. And confessing for the first time to the intensity
within him of this absurd speculation--which but proved also, no doubt,
the habit of too selfishly thinking--he affirmed the impotence there of
any other source of interest, any other native appeal. "What would it
have made of me, what would it have made of me? I keep for ever
wondering, all idiotically; as if I could possibly know! I see what it
has made of dozens of others, those I meet, and it positively aches
within me, to the point of exasperation, that it would have made
something of me as well. Only I can't make out what, and the worry of
it, the small rage of curiosity never to be satisfied, brings back what I
remember to have felt, once or twice, after judging best, for reasons, to
burn some important letter unopened. I've been sorry, I've hated it--I've
never known what was in the letter. You may, of course, say it's a
trifle--!"

"I don't say it's a trifle," Miss Staverton gravely interrupted.

She was seated by her fire, and before her, on his feet and restless, he
turned to and fro between this intensity of his idea and a fitful and
unseeing inspection, through his single eye-glass, of the dear little old
objects on her chimney-piece. Her interruption made him for an instant
look at her harder. "I shouldn't care if you did!" he laughed, however;
"and it's only a figure, at any rate, for the way I now feel. _Not_ to
have followed my perverse young course--and almost in the teeth of my
father's curse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so, 'over there,'
from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, to have
liked it, to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt, with such an
abysmal conceit of my own preference; some variation from _that_, I say,
must have produced some different effect for my life and for my 'form.' I