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 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?" "I see. You'd have liked me, have preferred me, a billionaire!" "How should I not have liked you?" she simply again asked.