“Surely,” she said laboriously, “there is only one course for you, for us all.”

“I’ll never marry Essie Scofield!” he declared bluntly.  His voice was unexpectedly loud, unpleasant; and it surprised him only less than Susan Brundon.  She drew back, and the colour sank from her cheeks; an increasing fear of him was visible.  “In the first place,” he continued, “Essie probably wouldn’t hear of it.  And if I managed that it would be only to make a private hell for us both.  It would not, it couldn’t, last a month.  There is nothing magical in marriage itself, there’s no general salvation in it, nothing to change a man or woman.  Why, by heaven, that’s what you have taught me, that is the heart of my wanting you.  You must feel it to understand.”  He circled the table and laid a hand on the back of her chair.  “Susan.”

Her head was bowed, and he could see only her smooth, dark bands of hair and the whiteness of her neck.  “Susan,” he said again.  “A second wrong will not cure the first.  If one was inexcusable the other would be fatal.  Married—­to some one else, with yourself always before me—­surely you must see the impossibility of that.  And am I to come to nothing, eternally fail, because of the past?  Isn’t there any escape, any hope, any possibility?  You don’t realize how very much will go down with me.  I am a man in the middle of life, and haven’t the time, the elasticity, of youth.  A few more years to the descent.  But, with you, they could be splendidly 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