"I suppose you'll even think I didn't give her the sums you sent; that damned Needles has been bleeding me, suspects something." She stopped from a lack of breath; her darkened face was purplish, in the shadows. "I haven't been well, either—a fierce pain here, in my heart."
It was the brandy, he told her; she should leave the city, late wine parties, go back into the country. "Go back," she echoed bitterly. "Where? How?" He winced—the past reaching inexorably into the future. Jasper Penny made no attempt to ignore, forget, his responsibility; he admitted it to her; but at the same time the tyrannical hunger increased within him—the mingled desire for fresh paths and the nostalgia of the old freedom of spirit. But life, that had made him, had in the same degree created Essie; neither had been the result of the other; they had been swept together, descended blindly in company, submerged in the passion that he had thought must last forever, but which had burned to ashes, to nothing more than a vague sense of putrefaction in life.
"Thank you," he said formally, putting away the note book. "Something, of course, must be done; but what, I can only say after I have seen Eunice. I am, undoubtedly, more to blame than yourself."
"I suppose, in this holy strain, you'll end by giving her all and me nothing."
"... what you are getting as long as you live?"
"That's little enough, when I hear how much you have, what all that iron is bringing you. Why, you could let me have twenty, thirty thousand, and never know it."
"If you are unable to get on, that too will be rectified."
"You are really not a bad old thing, Jasper," she pronounced, mollified. "At one time—do you remember?—you said if ever the chance came you would marry me. Ah, you needn't fear, I wouldn't have you with all your iron, gold. I—" she stopped abruptly, uneasily. "Not a bad old thing," she repeated, moving to secure a half-full glass.
"Why do you call me old?" he asked curiously.
"I hadn't thought of it before," she admitted; "but, this evening, you looked so solemn, and there is grey in your hair, that all at once you seemed like an old gentleman. Now Dan Culser," she hesitated, and then swept on, "he's what you'd name young." At Daniel Culser's age, he told himself, he, Jasper Penny, could have walked the other blind; and now Essie Scofield was calling him old; she had noticed the grey in his hair. He rose to go, and she came close to him, a clinging, soft thing of flesh faintly reeking with brandy. "I have a great deal to pay, where money goes I don't know, even a little would be a help." He left some gold in her hand, thankful to purchase, at that slight price, a momentary release.