The Jolly Corner | Page 8

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
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.
He stood before her still - her question kept him motionless. He took it
in, so much there was of it; and indeed his not otherwise meeting it
testified to that. "I know at least what I am," he simply went on; "the
other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifying - I believe
I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've
followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come
to you again and again - in fact you've admitted to me as much - that I
was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous
scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me."
She just waited, smiling