Yet the need, the longing forward, so newly come into his consciousness, persisted, grew—­it had become the predominate design of his weaving.  Through this he recognized a reassertion of his pride, the rigid pride of a black Penny, which, in the years immediately past, had been overwhelmed by a temporary inner confusion.  Beyond forty men returned to their inheritance, their blood; this fact echoed vaguely among his memories of things heard; and he felt in himself its measure of truth.  His distaste for a largely muddled, pandering society, for men huddled, he thought, like domestic animals, returned in choking waves.  In the maculate atmosphere of flat wine and stale cologne he had a sharp recurrence of the scent of pines, lifting warmly in sunny space.

He produced a morocco bound note book, a gold pencil; and, with the latter poised, directed a close interrogation at Essie.  Her face flushed with an ungovernable anger, and she pressed a hand over her labouring heart.  “Get her then; out Fourth Street, Camden; the Reverend Mr. Needles.  But afterwards don’t come complaining to me.  You ought to have seen to her; you’ve got the money, the influence.  And you have done nothing, beyond some stinking dollars ... wouldn’t even name her.  Eunice Scofield, a child without—­”

All that she had said was absolutely true, just.

“I suppose you’ll even think I didn’t give her the sums you sent; that damned Needles has been bleeding me, suspects something.”  She stopped from a lack of breath; her darkened face was purplish, in the shadows.  “I haven’t been well, either—­a fierce pain here, in my heart.”

It was the brandy, he told her; she should leave the city, late wine parties, go back into the country.  “Go back,” she echoed bitterly.  “Where?  How?” He winced—­the past reaching inexorably into the future.  Jasper Penny made no attempt to ignore, forget, his responsibility; he admitted it to her; but at the same time the tyrannical hunger increased within him—­the mingled desire for fresh paths and the nostalgia of the old freedom of spirit.  But life, that had made him, had in the same degree created Essie; neither had been the result of the other; they had been swept together, descended blindly in company, submerged in the passion that he had thought must last forever, but which had burned to ashes, to nothing more than a vague sense of putrefaction in life.

“Thank you,” he said formally, putting away the note book.  “Something, of course, must be done; but what, I can only say after I have seen Eunice.  I am, undoubtedly, more to blame than yourself.”

“I suppose, in this holy strain, you’ll end by giving her all and me nothing.”

“... what you are getting as long as you live?”

“That’s little enough, when I hear how much you have, what all that iron is bringing you.  Why, you could let me have twenty, thirty thousand, and never know it.”

“If you are unable to get on, that too will be rectified.”