It was, he discovered, past two, and he remorsefully summoned a servant.  He gazed with bewilderment at the list of dinner dishes tended him; bear’s meat, he felt, canvas back duck or terrapin, was not a diet proper to seven; but he solved the perplexity by ordering snipe, rolled and sugared cakes filled with whipped cream and preserved strawberries, and a deep apple pandowdy.  After this, and a block of nougat, Eunice discovered herself to be sleepy.  As she lay with tossed arms and pale streaming hair under the feather coverlet of a great hotel bed he saw with a sharp uneasiness that, in a subtle but unmistakable accent, she resembled her mother, Essie Scofield.

XIII

His thoughts darkened with the falling day; he supposed them to be solely addressed to the problem of Eunice; but, in reality, they constantly evaded his will, following countless trivialities, and returned to his own, peculiar need.  He made some small changes of dress for the evening, replacing brown with glazed black boots, and struggled, with one hand, through the ordeal of tying a formal neckcloth.  He had purposely left behind his negro servant as a possible source of unguarded chatter.  When Jasper Penny had finished he went in to Eunice and found her awake.  The new clothes lay in their open boxes; and, lighting candles, he wondered if he had better have some one in to assist her.  “Can you fix yourself up in these?” he asked, indicating the purchases.

“Oh, yes,” she assured him gravely; “that is except the very backest buttons.”  She stood by the folded piles of shirred muslin, the elaborate velvets and silks and ribbons, obviously at a loss before such an unparalleled choice; and he was once more disturbed by the attenuation of her small body.  But that could be soon remedied; she had suffered other, far greater, irremedial, oppressions; her very birth had confronted her, in the puritanical self-righteousness of his world, with an almost insuperable barrier to happiness.  Still back of that, even before the birth of himself and Essie Scofield, back, back in the unguessed past, Eunice had been shaped, condemned.  Her fate had only culminated in his own unbalanced passion, in a desire that had blinded him like a flash of ignited powder, leaving him with a sense of utter void, of inexplicable need.  “For what?” he demanded unconsciously and bitterly aloud.

Eunice, startled, dropped the garment in her hands.  She gazed at him with a shrinking dread.  “Come,” he told her gently, “that will be very pretty; and, don’t you think, the velvet bonnet with green?” After supper he questioned her.  “What time do you usually go to bed?” She answered promptly, “When it got too cold to stay up, at Mr. Needles’, but I wouldn’t know here.”