er living. Children, not hers, dragged at
her skirt. How much better for her to have a child of her own. Their
child! A great deal that had been vague in his thoughts became concrete
at that last period; not only the possible succession of the iron, but
the comprehension that a child now, before the increasing sterility of
multiplying years, would be an image of all his inmost craving and which
must else be lost.

Eunice was different. Pity, mingled with a rigid sense of his duty and a
faint accent of parenthood, comprehended his feeling for her. He stated
this to himself clearly, admitting what delinquency it carried. It was,
simply, an incontrovertible fact; and it was his habit to meet such
things squarely. A black Penny, he had no impulse to see existence in
imposed sentimental or formally moral conceptions. From all this he
returned with a feeling of delight to his personal longing for Susan
Brundon; he saw her bowed over the table in an exhaustion almost an
attitude of surrender. A slender, pliable figure in soft merino and
lace. He saw her beyond the candles of Graham Jannan's supper table, a
rose geranium at her breast. The motto of the bon bon partially
returned:

"... ange du ciel ... je t'aime!
... le bon heur supreme!"

XIX

In the morning he walked over to Stephen Jannan's office on Fourth
Street. The day was unexpectedly warm, and a mist rose about the wet
bricks of the city. He proceeded directly into Stephen's private
enclosure. "I was about to write you," the latter stated. "It's well
enough for you to direct Mrs. Scofield to confine her pleas to me, and
comparatively simple to picture her drawing a quarterly sum in an
orderly manner; but how you are going to realize that happy conception
is increasingly beyond me. I have to point out to her daily--a great
nuisance it is--that she cannot have her income before it is due. Heaven
knows what she has done with the other money in so short a while. She
hasn't moved, apparently increased her establishment; at your direction
the bills were settled, and heaven knows she had no reluctance in
presenting all that were permissible and a number doubtful. There is, of
course, one probability."

Jasper Penny's thoughts returned to the stony, handsome youth he had
seen in the company of Essie's friends, to the insinuations of the woman
who had been removed protesting her superiority and warning him against
a "tailor's dummy." Well, it was no longer his af