Susan stopped by the way.  A thousand little acts of alleviation, at best temporary, interrupted her living.  Children, not hers, dragged at her skirt.  How much better for her to have a child of her own.  Their child!  A great deal that had been vague in his thoughts became concrete at that last period; not only the possible succession of the iron, but the comprehension that a child now, before the increasing sterility of multiplying years, would be an image of all his inmost craving and which must else be lost.

Eunice was different.  Pity, mingled with a rigid sense of his duty and a faint accent of parenthood, comprehended his feeling for her.  He stated this to himself clearly, admitting what delinquency it carried.  It was, simply, an incontrovertible fact; and it was his habit to meet such things squarely.  A black Penny, he had no impulse to see existence in imposed sentimental or formally moral conceptions.  From all this he returned with a feeling of delight to his personal longing for Susan Brundon; he saw her bowed over the table in an exhaustion almost an attitude of surrender.  A slender, pliable figure in soft merino and lace.  He saw her beyond the candles of Graham Jannan’s supper table, a rose geranium at her breast.  The motto of the bon bon partially returned: 

“... ange du ciel ... je t’aime! ... le bon heur supreme!”

XIX

In the morning he walked over to Stephen Jannan’s office on Fourth Street.  The day was unexpectedly warm, and a mist rose about the wet bricks of the city.  He proceeded directly into Stephen’s private enclosure.  “I was about to write you,” the latter stated.  “It’s well enough for you to direct Mrs. Scofield to confine her pleas to me, and comparatively simple to picture her drawing a quarterly sum in an orderly manner; but how you are going to realize that happy conception is increasingly beyond me.  I have to point out to her daily—­a great nuisance it is—­that she cannot have her income before it is due.  Heaven knows what she has done with the other money in so short a while.  She hasn’t moved, apparently increased her establishment; at your direction the bills were settled, and heaven knows she had no reluctance in presenting all that were permissible and a number doubtful.  There is, of course, one probability.”

Jasper Penny’s thoughts returned to the stony, handsome youth he had seen in the company of Essie’s friends, to the insinuations of the woman who had been removed protesting her superiority and warning him against a “tailor’s dummy.”  Well, it was no longer his affair what Essie did with her money, what in her affections remained unimpaired.  Rather it was reassuring that she had so promptly found solace; it enlarged his own feeling of freedom.  “It got worse, yesterday,” Stephen Jannan continued; “she came to the office, insisted on seeing me.  Luckily I was busy with a mastership that kept me over three hours.  But she left, I was told, with the air of one soon to return.  She was brandied with purpose.  There is no end, Jasper, to what I am prepared to do for you; but, my dear fellow, neither of us can have this.  She wept.  My young gentlemen were pierced with sympathetic curiosity.  You must realize, Jasper, that you are not a sparrow, to float unnoticed from ledge to ledge.”