should have stuck here--if it had been possible; and I was too young, at
twenty-three, to judge, _pour deux sous_, whether it _were_ possible. If
I had waited I might have seen it was, and then I might have been, by
staying here, something nearer to one of these types who have been
hammered so hard and made so keen by their conditions. It isn't that I
admire them so much--the question of any charm in them, or of any charm,
beyond that of the rank money-passion, exerted by their conditions _for_
them, has nothing to do with the matter: it's only a question of what
fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature I mayn't
have missed. It comes over me that I had then a strange _alter ego_ deep
down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight
bud, and that I just took the course, I just transferred him to the
climate, that blighted him for once and for ever."

"And you wonder about the flower," Miss Staverton said. "So do I, if you
want to know; and so I've been wondering these several weeks. I believe
in the flower," she continued, "I feel it would have been quite splendid,
quite huge and monstrous."

"Monstrous above all!" her visitor echoed; "and I imagine, by the same
stroke, quite hideous and offensive."

"You don't believe that," she returned; "if you did you wouldn't wonder.
You'd know, and that would be enough for you. What you feel--and what I
feel _for_ you--is that you'd have had power."

"You'd have liked me that way?" he asked.

She barely hung fire. "How should I not have liked you?"