mere uninformed
wildness; but he still recalled the tremendous impatience with which he
had met the convenient enclosure of a practicable, organized society.
Even at Myrtle Forge, where--in contrast to dwelling in the confines of
a city--he had had a rare amount of actual freedom, a feeling of
constriction had sent him day after day into the woods, hunting or
merely idle along the upper reaches of still unsullied streams. Yet it
had been an especial kind of wildness; he owed that recognition to his
vanished youth. The term generally included champagne parties and the
companionship of various but similar ladies of the circus or opera
house. But nothing of that had then entered into his deep-rooted
rebellion. He had had merely a curious passion for complete
independence, an innate turning from street-bound affairs and men to the
isolation and physical accomplishment of arduous excursions on horses or
foot. He had, then, avoided, even dreaded, women. And that instinct, he
told himself, shifting his injured arm to a more comfortable position,
had been admirably founded.

The ax blows ceased; from his position he could just see the top of the
great wheel that drove the Forge trip hammer; and slowly the rim
blurred, commencing to turn. The forebay was open. A pennant of black
smoke, lurid with flaming cinders, twisted up in the motionless air. The
hammer fell once, experimentally, with a faint jar, and a grimy figure
shovelled charcoal into a barrow.

His mind soon returned to the point where it had been deflected by the
movement at the Forge; he could even visualize his mature boyhood--a
straight, arrogant figure, black certainly, with up-sloping brows and an
outthrust chin. And that, he thought, not without complacency, was not
very far from a description of himself at present. There were, of
course, the whiskers, severely trimmed on his spare face, and showing,
in certain lights, a glimmer of silver; but he was as upright, as
comfortably lean, now as then. He was still capable of prolonged
physical exertion.... It was ridiculous to think of himself as
definitely aging. Yet he was past forty, and the years seemed to go far
more swiftly than at twenty-one.

Women! The silent pronouncement included the smallest plural
possible--only two; but it seemed to Jasper Penny that they comprised
all the variations, the faults and virtues, of their entire sex. With a
certain, characteristic formality, propriety, he considered his w