Howat Penny had a sudden, startling sense of his utter
loneliness; there was absolutely no one, now, to whom he could turn for
the understanding born of long and intimately affectionate association.
Mariana was lost to him in her own poignant affair ... No children. So
many, so much, dead. His countenance, however, grew firm with the
determination that age should not find him a coward. He had always been
bitterly contemptuous of the men that, surfeiting their appetites,
showed at the impotent last a cheap repentance. But he had done nothing
pointedly wrong; he had--the inversion repeated itself--done nothing.
XXVII
At Shadrach his customary decision returned; he went about, or sat
reading, well-ordered, cool-appearing, dogmatic. He learned from the
_Evening Post_ that Mariana was at Warrenton. She had carefully
described to him the Virginia country life, the gaiety and hard riding
of the transplanted English colonies; and he pictured her at the
successive horse shows, in the brilliant groups under the Doric columns
of the porticoes. Then, he saw, she had gone north; he found her picture
in a realistic Egyptian costume with bare, painted legs at an
extravagant ball. He studied her countenance, magnifying it with a
reading glass; but he saw nothing beyond a surface enjoyment of the
moment.
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