Penny's overcoat," she brusquely directed a servant. He had
never seen a more delectable supper than the one awaiting him; and he
tasted most of what found its way to his plate--he owed that to the
maternal solicitude secretly regarding him, hastily masked as he met his
mother's gaze. Sitting later in accustomed formality the dulness of a
species of relief folded him. The minor sounds of his home, the
deliberate loudness of an old clock, the minute warring of his mother's
bone needles, her sister's fits of coughing, painfully restrained,
soothed his harried being; subjected to an intolerable strain his
overwrought nerves had suddenly relaxed; he sank back in a loose, almost
somnolent, state. A mental indolence possessed him; the keen incentives
of life appeared far, unimportant, his late rebellions and desires
inexplicable. Even the iron was a heavy load; the necessity of
constantly meeting new conditions with new processes, of uprooting month
by month most with which the years had made him familiar, seemed beyond
his power.
A faint dread crept into his consciousness; he roused himself sharply,
straightened his shoulders, glanced about to see if his tacit surrender
had been noticed--this lassitude creeping over him, the indifference,
was, at last, the edge of the authentic shadow of age, of decay; it was
the deadening of the sensibilities preceding death.
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