“You are really not a bad old thing, Jasper,” she pronounced, mollified.  “At one time—­do you remember?—­you said if ever the chance came you would marry me.  Ah, you needn’t fear, I wouldn’t have you with all your iron, gold.  I—­” she stopped abruptly, uneasily.  “Not a bad old thing,” she repeated, moving to secure a half-full glass.

“Why do you call me old?” he asked curiously.

“I hadn’t thought of it before,” she admitted; “but, this evening, you looked so solemn, and there is grey in your hair, that all at once you seemed like an old gentleman.  Now Dan Culser,” she hesitated, and then swept on, “he’s what you’d name young.”  At Daniel Culser’s age, he told himself, he, Jasper Penny, could have walked the other blind; and now Essie Scofield was calling him old; she had noticed the grey in his hair.  He rose to go, and she came close to him, a clinging, soft thing of flesh faintly reeking with brandy.  “I have a great deal to pay, where money goes I don’t know, even a little would be a help.”  He left some gold in her hand, thankful to purchase, at that slight price, a momentary release.

Outside Cherry Street was blackly cold, a gas lamp at the corner shed a watery, contracted illumination.  He made his way back toward the hotel, but a sudden reluctance to mount to his lonely chambers possessed him.  Before the glimmering marble facade he took out his watch, a pale gold efflorescence in the gloom, and rang the hour in minute, clear notes.  The third quarter past ten.  He recalled the ball, but then commencing, at Stephen Jannan’s; there it would be indescribably gay, a house flooded with the music of quadrilles, light, polite-chatter; and he determined to proceed and have a cigar with Stephen.

He walked briskly up Mulberry Street to Sixth and there turned to the left.  Jasper Penny soon passed the shrouded silence of Independence Square, with the new Corinthian doorway of the State House showing vaguely through the irregularly grouped ailanthus trees.  Beyond, the brick wall with its marble coping and high iron fence reached, on the opposite side, to the Jannan corner.  The length of the brick dwelling, with white arched windows and coursings faced the vague emptiness of Washington Square, closed for the winter.

Inside the hall was bright and filled with the pungent warmth of fat hearth coal.  A servant, with a phrase of recognition, directed him above, to a room burdened with masculine greatcoats and silk hats.  There an attendant told him that Mr. Jannan was below.  Jasper Penny had no intention of becoming a participant in the hall, but neither did he propose to linger among wraps, listening to the supercilious chatter of young men in the extreme mode of bright blue coats, painfully tight black trousers with varnished pumps and expanses of ankle in grey silk.  One, inspecting him through an eyeglass on a woven hair guard, expressed a pointed surprise at Jasper Penny’s informal garb.  “Christoval!” he ejaculated.  “It approaches an insult to the da-da-darlings.”  Another commenced to sing a popular minstrel air: