useful, happy; happy, I think, for us both. I know that a
great many people would say as you have, but it is wrong in every
aspect, absolutely hopeless. Essie's values are totally different from
yours; she has her own necessities; one measure will not do for all
women."

She rose and stood facing him, very near, her crinoline swaying against
him, and said blindly, "You shall marry her."

"I'll be damned if I do," Jasper Penny asserted. "I will marry you,
you," he whispered, with his lips against the fineness of her ear. Her
hands were on his shoulders; but she neither drew herself into his
embrace nor repulsed him. He wanted to crush her softness in his arms,
to kiss her still face into acquiescence. The quality, the kind, of his
need made it impossible. She slipped back without a sound into her
chair, drooping forward over the table.

A sharp pity invaded him, holding him back from her, silencing the flow
of his reasoning and appeal. It defeated, in the stirring tenderness of
its consideration, his purpose. He could not continue tormenting her,
racking her delicate, taut sensibilities by a hard insistence. He
withdrew quietly, to where his hat and stick rested on a chair, and
gathered them up. Still she didn't move, raise her head, break the low
fumbling of the soft coal. He could no longer distinguish her clearly,
she was blurring in a dusk deeping so imperceptibly that it seemed a
gradual failing of his vision. The geographer's globe appeared to sway
slightly, like a balloon tied to a string; the gay muslin of the piled
text books had lost their designs. Suddenly the room without motion, the
approaching night, the desirable presence of the woman growing more
immaterial, more shadow-like to elude his reaching hands, presented a
symbol, an epitome, of himself. Day fading swiftly into dark; dissolving
the realities of table and flesh and floor; leaving only the hunger,
the insuperable inner necessity and sense of loss.

"Good-bye," he breathed. Jasper Penny saw that she raised her head, he
caught the glimmering pallor of her face. But she said nothing, and sank
back into the crumpled position on the table. He went out, closing the
door of the office, shutting her into the loneliness of her resolve, her
insistence.

In the familiar rooms at Sanderson's Hotel he revolved again and again
all that she had said. For a little he even endeavoured to inspect
calmly the possibility of a marriage with Essie Scofield. Steeped