Upon alternately burning his fingers and throat with a steaming glass of St. Croix, Jasper Penny and Graham Jannan proceeded to the Furnace where, in the cast house, they watched the preparations for a flow of metal.  The head founder, McQuatty, bearded to the eyes and swathed in a hide apron, stood at the Ironmaster’s side.  “The charcoal you’d get’s not worth a bawbee,” he complained; “soft stuff would hardly run lead.  And where they’d cut six thousand cords of wood will no longer show more than four.  Shadrach ought to put out twenty-eight tons of pig in a week; and you see the statements.”

“Stone coal,” Jasper Penny replied; “and a hot blast.”  He turned to describe the latter to Jannan.  “It’ll come,” the founder agreed, “and the quality will go.”  He went forward to tap the clay-sealed hearth.  The liquid iron poured into the channels of its sand bed, sputtering and slowly fading to dingy grey.  “I’d like you to take hold of this,” Jasper Penny told the younger man; “great changes, improvements, are just over the hill.  I’ll miss them—­a link between the old and the new.  But you would see it all.  The railroad will bring about an iron age; and then, perhaps, steel.  I look for trouble, too—­this damned States Rights.  The South has been uneasy since the Carolina Nullification Act.  It will be a time for action.”  He gazed keenly at Graham Jannan.  A promising young man, he thought, with a considerable asset in his wife.  A woman, the right woman, could make a tremendous difference in a man’s capabilities.

He elaborated this thought fantastically at dinner, sitting opposite Susan Brundon.  Mary Jannan wore orange crepe, with black loops of ball fringe and purple silk dahlias; and, beside her, Miss Brundon’s dress was noticeably simple.  She volunteered little, but, when directly addressed, answered in a gentle, hesitating voice that veiled the directness, the conviction, of her replies.  The right woman, Jasper Penny repeated silently.  Ten, fifteen, years ago, when he had been free, he would have acted immediately on the feeling that Susan Brundon was exactly the wife he wanted.  But no such person had appeared at that momentous period in his life.

However, then he had been a totally different being; perhaps the appreciation of Miss Brundon, her actual reality, lay for him entirely in his own perceptions.  But if she would not have been the woman for him then, by heaven, she was now!  He expressed this unaware of its wide implications, unconscious of the effect it would instantly have.  The thing silently uttered bred an enormously increased need, the absolute determination that she was necessary to his most perfunctory being.  The thought of her alone, he discovered, had been sufficient to give him a new energy, a sense of rare satisfaction.