He was ordinarily impervious to the influence of weather, the more depressing aspects of nature; but now he was conscious of a dejection communicated, in part at least, he felt, by the bleak prospect without.  Another, and infinitely more arresting, reason for this feeling had just stirred his thoughts—­for the first time he was conscious of the invidious, beginning weariness of accumulating years.  He was hardly past forty, and he impatiently repudiated the possibility that he was actually declining; in fact he had not yet reached the zenith of his capabilities, physical or mental; yet his broken arm, slow in mending, the pain, had unquestionably depleted him more than a similar accident ten years ago.  Not only this, but, during the forced inaction, his mind had definitely taken a different cast; considerations that had seemed to constitute the main business of existence had lately faded before preoccupations and feelings ignored until now.

Jasper Penny saw, objectively, not so much the surrounding circumstance as his own former acts and emotions; detached from his habitual being by hardly more than a month his past was posed before his critical judgment.  Looked at in this manner his life appeared crowded with surprisingly meaningless gestures and words, his sheer youth an incomprehensible revolt.  A greater part of that had been lately expressed by his mother, when he had returned to Myrtle Forge with an arm broken by a fall in a railroad coach travelling to Philadelphia.  She had said, shaking her head with tightened lips: 

“I warned you plenty against those train brigades.  It isn’t safe nor sensible with a good horse service convenient.  But then you have always been a knowing, head-strong boy and man....  A black Penny.”

How she would get along without that last phrase he was at a loss to conjecture, from his first consciousness he recalled it, now a term of reproach and now extenuation.  Only a few weeks before she had repeated it in precisely the same tone of mingled admonition and complaint that had greeted his most boyish mishaps.  He had grown so accustomed to it, not only from Gilda Penny but from every one familiar with the Pennys and their history, that it had become part of his automatic entity.  Jasper—­a black Penny.

The course of his thoughts turned back to the earliest episodes remembered in that connection, to a time in which the especial quality had necessarily freest play.  Now he characterized it as mere uninformed wildness; but he still recalled the tremendous impatience with which he had met the convenient enclosure of a practicable, organized society.  Even at Myrtle Forge, where—­in contrast to dwelling in the confines of a city—­he had had a rare amount of actual freedom, a feeling of constriction had sent him day after day into the woods, hunting or merely idle along the upper reaches of still unsullied streams.  Yet it had been an especial kind of wildness; he owed that recognition to his vanished