“On honor, yes, I care,” she said. He looked white and kept the bud in his hand. She wished to help him, but she did not wish to preach nor sentimentalize.
“You have abused this rosebud fearfully,” rising and examining one on the bush. “You have shattered the rose and the leaves. Here is a bud which you have marred, but—” she stooped to examine it more closely; “but I see it is not beyond the power of performing good uses still and of opening to mature life.”
These kind of analogies were not exactly in his line of thought, but somehow as with her he looked at this bud, with one side of the moss stripped off and the wound on the outer leaf, he became very sorry for the little Reginald Grove who buried his mother, and afterwards so badly mismanaged himself. For the moment he felt that all he had ever possessed which was worth caring about, was what he had had when, environed by mother-love, he grew up in her smiles. It was a presence about Ethelbert which made that time seem so valuable. He looked up at the simple house, and then at Ethelbert’s dainty but inexpensive dress. The fragrance of the rose seemed intoxicating with its story of possible redemption. Yet every instinct of his better nature told him it was impossible that his life could ever blend with Ethelbert’s, while also his best instincts, with an exigency of strong desire, demanded just that union. He was in a torture of soul, comparable with nothing he had ever before experienced. Suddenly he remembered his wealth, but it seemed only an abject thing. Yet presently, for some reason, he said: “Do you care for wealth?”
“Immensely,” said Ethelbert.
He looked up at her as though he could not believe his ears; but in his heart there was a hope, broken by doubt and darkened by disappointment; a hope that all-conquering wealth could win even her, but a disappointment in her if this could so be. After a moment he stumbled on, saying: “I—I somehow don’t see much good in it. After you have eaten all you can, and have drunken more than—than you ought, and made a fashion-block of yourself, and so on; in fact, you know money can’t give you back whatever there was in those old days,” said Reginald, motioning toward the rose; “it can’t make the now impossible possible.”
“That depends,” said Ethelbert. “Money could make the now impossible possible to many people.”
He looked at her with that same compound expression on his countenance; for you know this man, who had never grown to real manhood, being much bigger outside than he was in,—this man had for years stood on guard against the many girls whom he fancied wished to marry his money. So he said, with a dash of the Grove suspicious shrewdness: “Is there anything now impossible to you that it could make possible?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her with lowering lights in his eyes.
“Do you want that thing very much?”