"Will you sit
for a little?" the elder proceeded. "Or perhaps you'd rather change at
once. I've no doubt it was sticky in the city."
"Thank you; perhaps I'd better--the last." Rudolph appeared, and
conducted the young man above. Howat Penny sat suddenly, his lips folded
in a stubborn line. Mariana had behaved outrageously; she must be
familiar with the whole, miserable, past episode; she had given him some
very bad moments. He had a personal bitterness toward that old, unhappy
affair, the dereliction of his dead grandfather--it had been, he had
always felt, largely responsible for his own course in life; it had,
before his birth even, formed his limitations, as it had those of his
father.
The latter had been the child of a dangerously late marriage, a marriage
from which time and delay had stripped both material potency and
sustaining illusion. Jasper Penny had been nearing fifty when his son
was born; and that act of deliberate sacrifice on the part of his wife,
entering middle age, had imposed an inordinate amount of suffering on
her last years. Their child, it was true, had been of normal stature,
and lived to within a short space of a half century. But then he had
utterly collapsed, died in three days from what had first appeared a
slight cold; and, throughout his maturity, he had been a man of feverish
mind.
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