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 at him.  “You see what it has made of me.”

“Oh you’re a person whom nothing can have altered.  You were born to be what you are, anywhere, anyway:  you’ve the perfection nothing else could have blighted.  And don’t you see how, without my exile, I shouldn’t have been waiting till now—?” But he pulled up for the strange pang.

“The great thing to see,” she presently said, “seems to me to be that it has spoiled nothing.  It hasn’t spoiled your being here at last.  It hasn’t spoiled this.  It hasn’t spoiled your speaking—­” She also however faltered.

He wondered at everything her controlled emotion might mean.  “Do you believe then—­too dreadfully!—­that I am as good as I might ever have been?”

“Oh no!  Far from it!” With which she got up from her chair and was nearer to him.  “But I don’t care,” she smiled.

“You mean I’m good enough?”

She considered a little.  “Will you believe it if I say so?  I mean will you let that settle your question for you?” And then as if making out in his face that he drew back from this, that he had some idea which, however absurd, he couldn’t yet bargain away:  “Oh you don’t care either—­but very differently:  you don’t care for anything but yourself.”