youth.  The term generally included champagne parties and the companionship of various but similar ladies of the circus or opera house.  But nothing of that had then entered into his deep-rooted rebellion.  He had had merely a curious passion for complete independence, an innate turning from street-bound affairs and men to the isolation and physical accomplishment of arduous excursions on horses or foot.  He had, then, avoided, even dreaded, women.  And that instinct, he told himself, shifting his injured arm to a more comfortable position, had been admirably founded.

The ax blows ceased; from his position he could just see the top of the great wheel that drove the Forge trip hammer; and slowly the rim blurred, commencing to turn.  The forebay was open.  A pennant of black smoke, lurid with flaming cinders, twisted up in the motionless air.  The hammer fell once, experimentally, with a faint jar, and a grimy figure shovelled charcoal into a barrow.

His mind soon returned to the point where it had been deflected by the movement at the Forge; he could even visualize his mature boyhood—­a straight, arrogant figure, black certainly, with up-sloping brows and an outthrust chin.  And that, he thought, not without complacency, was not very far from a description of himself at present.  There were, of course, the whiskers, severely trimmed on his spare face, and showing, in certain lights, a glimmer of silver; but he was as upright, as comfortably lean, now as then.  He was still capable of prolonged physical exertion....  It was ridiculous to think of himself as definitely aging.  Yet he was past forty, and the years seemed to go far more swiftly than at twenty-one.

Women!  The silent pronouncement included the smallest plural possible—­only two; but it seemed to Jasper Penny that they comprised all the variations, the faults and virtues, of their entire sex.  With a certain, characteristic formality, propriety, he considered his wife first, now a year dead.  He wondered if she had found the orthodox and concrete heaven in the frequent ecstatic contemplation of which so much of her life had been spent.  It had been that fine superiority to the material that had first attracted him to her, a quality of shining enthusiasm, of reflected inspiration from a vision, however trite, of eternal hymning; and it had been that same essence which finally held them apart through the greater number of their married years.  Phebe’s health, slowly ebbing, had drawn her farther and farther from the known world in general and the affairs and being of her husband in particular; her last strength had gone in the hysteria of protracted religious emotion, during which she had become scarcely more to Jasper Penny than an attenuated, rapt invalid lingering in his house.