I don't think there's any doubt that the bookshop would have failed eventually, but without Violet, Florence might have been able to retrieve something from the wreckage. And it still would have been a longer chunk of her life that had been sustained, which matters also.
Fitzgerald is explicit:
Quote:
She blinded herself, in short, by pretending for a while that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given moment, predominating.
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