Her pale, still presence was usurped by a far different, animated and colourful, figure.  He thought of Essie Scofield, of all that she paramountly held and expressed, with a reluctance that had lately, almost within the past week, grown to resemble resentment, if not actual irritation.  Yet, however, casting back through the years, in his present remoteness, he was able to recreate her and his emotions as they had first, irresistibly moved together.  The absolute opposite of Phebe, already withdrawing into her religious, incorporeal region, Essie Scofield had immediately swept him into the whirlpool of her vivid, physical personality.  Before her the memory of his wife faded into insignificance.  But there was no mere retrospect in the considering of Essie; very much alive she presented, outside the Penny iron, the one serious preoccupation, complication, of his future.

At the time when he had first admitted, welcomed, her claim on him, he had felt a sudden energy in which he had recognized a play of the traits of a black Penny.  Here was a satisfactory, if necessarily private, exercise of his inborn contempt for the evident hypocrisy, the cowardice, of perfunctory inhibitions and safe morals.  That, however, had been speedily lost in his rocketing passion, flaring out of a quiet continence into giddy spaces of unrestraint.  Essie, after a momentary surrender, had attempted retreat, expressing a doubt of the durability of their feeling; she had, in fact, made it painfully clear that she wished to escape from the uncomfortable volume of his fervour; but he had overborne her caution—­her wisdom, he now expressed it.

That, more than anything else, brought before him the undeniable passage of time, the fact that he was rapidly accomplishing middle age—­the total extinguishing of an emotion which he had felt must outlast life.  It had gone, and with it his youth.  Of course, he had recognized that he was no longer thirty; he had been well aware of his years, but only during the last few weeks had there been the slight, perceptible dragging down....  On the black walnut dressing stand past the window lay a letter he had received from Essie that morning; it contained her usual appeal for an additional sum of money—­he gave her, formally, six thousand dollars a year; and the manner of the demand, for the necessities of their daughter, showed his sharpened perceptions that she had never really experienced the blindness of a generous emotion.  Eunice, the child, was incontrovertible proof of that—­no more than an additional lever for her to swing.

His face darkened, and he moved his shoulder impatiently, as if to throw off a burden grown unendurable.  But it was fastened immovably—­his responsibility was as baldly apparent as the February noon, its greyness now blotted by a wind-driven, metallic shift of snow.