He was ordinarily impervious to the influence of weather, the more
depressing aspects of nature; but now he was conscious of a dejection
communicated, in part at least, he felt, by the bleak prospect without.
Another, and infinitely more arresting, reason for this feeling had just
stirred his thoughts--for the first time he was conscious of the
invidious, beginning weariness of accumulating years. He was hardly past
forty, and he impatiently repudiated the possibility that he was
actually declining; in fact he had not yet reached the zenith of his
capabilities, physical or mental; yet his broken arm, slow in mending,
the pain, had unquestionably depleted him more than a similar accident
ten years ago. Not only this, but, during the forced inaction, his mind
had definitely taken a different cast; considerations that had seemed to
constitute the main business of existence had lately faded before
preoccupations and feelings ignored until now.
Jasper Penny saw, objectively, not so much the surrounding circumstance
as his own former acts and emotions; detached from his habitual being by
hardly more than a month his past was posed before his critical
judgment. Looked at in this manner his life appeared crowded with
surprisingly meaningless gestures and words, his sheer youth an
incomprehensible revolt. A greater part of that had been lately
expressed by his mother, when he had returned to Myrtle Forge with an
arm broken by a fall in a railroad coach travelling to Philadelphia. She
had said, shaking her head with tightened lips:
"I warned you plenty against those train brigades. It isn't safe nor
sensible with a good horse service convenient. But then you have always
been a knowing, head-strong boy and man.... A black Penny."
How she would get along without that last phrase he was at a loss to
conjecture, from his first consciousness he recalled it, now a term of
reproach and now extenuation. Only a few weeks before she had repeated
it in precisely the same tone of mingled admonition and complaint that
had greeted his most boyish mishaps. He had grown so accustomed to it,
not only from Gilda Penny but from every one familiar with the Pennys
and their history, that it had become part of his automatic entity.
Jasper--a black Penny.
The course of his thoughts turned back to the earliest episodes
remembered in that connection, to a time in which the especial quality
had necessarily freest play. Now he characterized it as
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