lity 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.

Shortly expressed, he wanted to marry her; he had not, he told himself
oddly, ever been married. The word had a significance which heretofore
he had completely missed. A strange emotion stirred into being, a
longing thrown out from his new desire, the late-born feeling of
dissatisfaction; it was a wish for something in Susan Brundon which he
experienced but could not name. Roughly stated it was a hunger to
surround her with