THE JOLLY CORNER
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
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