To sweep Susan Brundon into his desire, overwhelm her
defences--he called them prejudices but immediately after withdrew that
term--offered the greatest, the only promise of success. An obliterating
snow fell for the following thirty hours, and a week went by in the
readjustment to ordinary conditions of living and travel. But at the end
of that period Jasper Penny left Myrtle Forge for the city, with a
determined, an almost confident, mouth, and a bright, hard gaze. Late
afternoon, he decided, would be the best time for his appearance at the
Academy. And the western sky was a luminous, bright red when he passed
under the stripped, uneasy branches of the willow trees to the school
door.
Miss Brundon's office, rigorous as the corridor of a hospital, had a
table and uncompromising wooden chairs on a rectangle of bluish-pink
carpet; a glowing, round stove held a place on a square of gleaming,
embossed zinc, while the remaining surfaces were scrubbed oak flooring
and white calcimine. A large geographer's globe, a sphere of pale,
glazed yellow traced in violet and thin vermilion and cobalt, rested on
an involuted mahogany stand; and a pile of text books covered in gay
muslin made a single, decisive note of colour.
She kept him waiting, he felt uneasily, a long while; perhaps she had a
class; but he felt that that was not the reason for her delay.
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