in a straight road
to you, the long road I have never, really, left."

"I can't," she said still again. "I want to, Jasper. Oh, with a heart
full of longing; I am so tired that I would almost give the rest of my
life for another secure hour with you. And I would pay that to give you
what you want, what you should have. But something stronger than I am,
more than all this, holds me; I can't forget that miserable woman, nor
her child and yours, so thin and suspicious. I am not good enough to be
her mother myself, even if I felt I had the right. Inside of me I am
quite wicked, selfish. I want my own. But not with the other woman
outside. She'd be looking in at the windows, Jasper, looking in at my
heart. I would hear her." She leaned against her arm, her face hid, her
shoulders trembling.

The musty odour of the stores floated out and enveloped him. He was
suddenly annoyed. Susan herself lost some of her beauty, her radiance.
He muttered that she was merely stubborn, blind to reality, to
necessity. His attitude hardened, and he commenced to argue in a low,
insistent voice. She made no reply, but remained supported in the
doorway, a vague form against the inner dark.

"You must change your mind," he asserted; "you can't be eternally so
foolish. There is absolutely no question of my marrying Essie Scofield."

"I don't want you to, really," she admitted in an agonized whisper. "I
shall never again ask you to do that. Ah, God, how low I am."

He saw, in an unsparing flash of comprehension, that it was useless. She
would never marry him as long as the past stayed embodied, actual, to
peer into their beings. A return of his familiar irritability, spleen,
possessed him. "You are too pure for this world," he said brutally. She
turned and stood facing him, meeting his scorn with an uplifted
countenance. A shifting reflection from the Furnace stack fell over her
in a wan veil, over the vaporous, sprigged white of her dress, her bare
throat and arms, her cheeks wet with tears. Out of it her eyes, wide
with pain, steadily met his angry scrutiny. Out of it she smiled at him
before the reflection died.

III THE METAL

XXIII

In the warm, subdued light of a double lamp with apricot glass shades
Howat Penny was turning over the pages, stiff with dry paste, of an
album filled with opera programmes. The date of the brief, precisely
penned label on the black cover was 1883-84; it was the first of a
number of such thi