She glanced at him with an instant masking of her resentment. "I've told you a hundred times—in the house of a very respectable clergyman. My letter was clear enough; she's had bronchitis, and there's the doctor, and—"
"Just where is Eunice?" he repeated, interrupting her aggrieved recital.
"Where I put her," her voice grew shrill. "You haven't asked to see her for near a year, you haven't even pretended an interest in—in your own daughter. I've done the best I could; you know I don't like children around; but I have attended to as much of my duty as you. Now you come out and insist on being unpleasant all in an hour. Why didn't you write? I'd had her here for you. Come back in two or three days."
"To-morrow," he replied. "I am going to see her in the morning."
"You just ain't. I did the best I knew, but, if it isn't all roses, you'll blame everything on me. I will have Eunice fetched—"
"Where is she?" he asked still again, wearily.
Every instinct revolted against the degradation into which he had blindly walked. His youth had betrayed him, involving him, practically a different man, in a payment which he realized had but commenced.... To escape. He had first thought of that with the unconscious conviction that the mere wish carried its fulfilment. In fact, it would be immensely difficult; a man, he saw, could not sever himself so casually from the past; it reached without visible demarcation into the present, the future. All was a piece, one with another; and Essie Scofield was drawn in a vivid thread through the entire fabric of his being.
Yet the need, the longing forward, so newly come into his consciousness, persisted, grew—it had become the predominate design of his weaving. Through this he recognized a reassertion of his pride, the rigid pride of a black Penny, which, in the years immediately past, had been overwhelmed by a temporary inner confusion. Beyond forty men returned to their inheritance, their blood; this fact echoed vaguely among his memories of things heard; and he felt in himself its measure of truth. His distaste for a largely muddled, pandering society, for men huddled, he thought, like domestic animals, returned in choking waves. In the maculate atmosphere of flat wine and stale cologne he had a sharp recurrence of the scent of pines, lifting warmly in sunny space.
He produced a morocco bound note book, a gold pencil; and, with the latter poised, directed a close interrogation at Essie. Her face flushed with an ungovernable anger, and she pressed a hand over her labouring heart. "Get her then; out Fourth Street, Camden; the Reverend Mr. Needles. But afterwards don't come complaining to me. You ought to have seen to her; you've got the money, the influence. And you have done nothing, beyond some stinking dollars ... wouldn't even name her. Eunice Scofield, a child without—"
All that she had said was absolutely true, just.