“Do you mind—­no more at present.”  Susan Brundon said.  “I am upset; please, another time; if it is necessary.  I feel that I couldn’t answer anything now, I must go up; no, your mother will show me.”  She rose, and he realized that she would listen no further.  There was an astonishing strength of purpose behind her deprecating presence.  She was more determined than himself.  He watched her walk evenly from the room, heard the low stir of voices beyond, with a feeling that he had been perhaps fatally clumsy.  All that he had said had been wrong, brutally selfish.  He had deliberately invited failure; he should have been patient, waited; given her a chance to know and, if possible, value him, come to depend on him, on his judgment, his ability in her welfare.  But, in place of making himself a necessity, he had launched at once into facts which she must find hideous.  She had said, “another time, if necessary.”  His mouth drew into a set line—­there would be another and another, until he had persuaded, gained, her.

He lit a cigar, and walked discontentedly up and across the room.  The sound of the Forge hammer again crept into his consciousness:  the Penny iron—­the fibre, the actuality, of the Penny men!  He repeated this arrogantly; but the declaration no longer brought reassurance; the certainty even of the iron faded from him; he had failed there, too, digging a pit of oblivion for all that their generations of toil had accomplished.  The past inexorably woven into the pattern of the future!  Eunice, so soon wary, distrustful, Susan had seen that immediately, would perpetuate all that he wished dead—­Essie and himself bound together, projected in an undesirable immortality through endless lives striving, like himself, to escape from old chains.

If he failed with Susan his existence would have been an unmitigated evil; the iron, his petty, material triumphs, would rust, but the other go on and on.  His thoughts became a maze of pity for Eunice, infinite regret of the past, a bitter energy of hope for what might follow.

He turned with pride to his forging—­long-wrought charcoal iron; the world would know no better.  Still, with his penetration of the future, he realized that the old, careful processes were doomed.  He had difficulty in assembling enough adequate workmen to fill the increasing contracts for bar iron and rails now; and the demand, with the extension of steam railways, would grow resistlessly.  More wholesale methods of production were being utilized daily; he was one of the foremost adherents of “improvement”; but suddenly he felt a poignant regret at the inevitable passing of the old order of great Ironmasters, the principalities of furnaces and forges.  He was still, he felt, such a master of his men and miles of forests and clearings, lime pits and ore banks, coal holes, mills, coke ovens, hearths and manufactories.  He might still drive to Virginia through a continuous line of his interests; his domination over his labourers, in all their personal and industrial implications, was patriarchal; he commanded, through their allegiance and his entire grasp on every iota of their living, their day’s journey; but, he told himself, he was practically the last of his kind.