m 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 tha