Women! The silent pronouncement included the smallest plural
possible--only two; but it seemed to Jasper Penny that they comprised
all the variations, the faults and virtues, of their entire sex. With a
certain, characteristic formality, propriety, he considered his wife
first, now a year dead. He wondered if she had found the orthodox and
concrete heaven in the frequent ecstatic contemplation of which so much
of her life had been spent. It had been that fine superiority to the
material that had first attracted him to her, a quality of shining
enthusiasm, of reflected inspiration from a vision, however trite, of
eternal hymning; and it had been that same essence which finally held
them apart through the greater number of their married years. Phebe's
health, slowly ebbing, had drawn her farther and farther from the known
world in general and the affairs and being of her husband in particular;
her last strength had gone in the hysteria of protracted religious
emotion, during which she had become scarcely more to Jasper Penny than
an attenuated, rapt invalid lingering in his house.

Her pale, still presence was usurped by a far different, animated and
colourful, figure. He thought of Essie Scofield, of all that she
paramountly held and expressed, with a reluctance that had lately,
almost within the past week, grown to resemble resentment, if not actual
irritation. Yet, however, casting back through the years, in his present
remoteness, he was able to recreate her and his emotions as they had
first, irresistibly moved together. The absolute opposite of Phebe,
already withdrawing into her religious, incorporeal region, Essie
Scofield had immediately swept him into the whirlpool of her vivid,
physical personality. Before her the memory of his wife faded into
insignificance. But there was no mere retrospect in the considering of
Essie; very much alive she presented, outside the Penny iron, the one
serious preoccupation, complication, of his future.