globe appeared to sway slightly, like a balloon tied to a string; the gay muslin of the piled text books had lost their designs.  Suddenly the room without motion, the approaching night, the desirable presence of the woman growing more immaterial, more shadow-like to elude his reaching hands, presented a symbol, an epitome, of himself.  Day fading swiftly into dark; dissolving the realities of table and flesh and floor; leaving only the hunger, the insuperable inner necessity and sense of loss.

“Good-bye,” he breathed.  Jasper Penny saw that she raised her head, he caught the glimmering pallor of her face.  But she said nothing, and sank back into the crumpled position on the table.  He went out, closing the door of the office, shutting her into the loneliness of her resolve, her insistence.

In the familiar rooms at Sanderson’s Hotel he revolved again and again all that she had said.  For a little he even endeavoured to inspect calmly the possibility of a marriage with Essie Scofield.  Steeped in Susan’s spirit he thought of it as a reparation, to Eunice, perhaps to Essie, but more certainly to an essence within himself.  But immediately he saw the futility of such a course; the inexorable logic of existence could not be so easily placated, its rhyming of cause and effect defeated.  All that he had told Susan Brundon recurred strengthened to an immovable conviction.  The thought of marrying Essie was intolerable, farcical; to the woman herself it would mean utter boredom.  Such a thing must lead inevitably to a greater misfortune than any of the past.  Susan, in her resplendent ignorance of facts, failed to realize the impossibility of what she upheld.  No, no, it was out of the question.

He wondered if he had progressed in the other, his supreme, wish.  And he felt, with a stirring of blood, that he had.  Susan cared for him; her action had made that plain.  That was a tremendous advantage; with another he would have thought it conclusive; but not—­not quite with Susan Brundon.  He had a deep regard for her determination, so surprising in the midst of her fragility.  Yet, if pity had not prevented him, this afternoon, in her office, he might have forced her to a sharper realization of a more earthly need, the ache for sympathy, consolation, the imperative cry of self.  That was his greatest difficulty, to overcome her lifelong habit of thinking of others before herself.  Such, he knew, was the root of her appeal for Essie, rather than a cold, dogmatic conception.  Self-effacement.

At this a restive state followed; personally he had no confidence in the sacrifice of individual aims and happiness.  Any course of that sort, he told himself, in the management of his practical affairs, would have resulted in his failure.  There were a hundred men in the country plotting for his overthrow, anxious to take his position, scheming to undersell him, to discover the secret of the quality of his iron rails.  Others he had deliberately, necessarily, ruined.  No good would have been served by his stepping aside, allowing smaller men to flourish and annoy him, cut down his production by inconsiderable sales.  He, and his family, had built a great, yes, and beneficial, industry by ruthlessly beating out a broad and broader way for their progress.  It was needful to gaze fixedly at the end desirable and move in the straightest line possible.