A sharp pity invaded him, holding him back from her, silencing the flow of his reasoning and appeal. It defeated, in the stirring tenderness of its consideration, his purpose. He could not continue tormenting her, racking her delicate, taut sensibilities by a hard insistence. He withdrew quietly, to where his hat and stick rested on a chair, and gathered them up. Still she didn't move, raise her head, break the low fumbling of the soft coal. He could no longer distinguish her clearly, she was blurring in a dusk deeping so imperceptibly that it seemed a gradual failing of his vision. The geographer's globe appeared to sway slightly, like a balloon tied to a string; the gay muslin of the piled text books had lost their designs. Suddenly the room without motion, the approaching night, the desirable presence of the woman growing more immaterial, more shadow-like to elude his reaching hands, presented a symbol, an epitome, of himself. Day fading swiftly into dark; dissolving the realities of table and flesh and floor; leaving only the hunger, the insuperable inner necessity and sense of loss. "Good-bye," he breathed. Jasper Penny saw that she raised her head, he caught the glimmering pallor of her face. But she said nothing, and sank back into the crumpled position on the table. He went out, closing the door of the office, shutting her into the loneliness of her resolve, her insistence. In the familiar rooms at Sanderson's Hotel he revolved again and again all that she had said. For a little he even endeavoured to inspect calmly the possibility of a marriage with Essie Scofield. Steeped in Susan's spirit he thought of it as a reparation, to Eunice, perhaps to Essie, but more certainly to an essence within himself. But immediately he saw the futility of such a course; the inexorable logic of existence could not be so easily placated, its rhyming of cause and effect defeated. All that he had told Susan Brundon recurred strengthened to an immovable conviction. The thought of marrying Essie was intolerable, farcical; to the woman herself it would mean utter boredom. Such a thing must lead inevitably to a greater misfortune than any of the past. Susan, in her resplendent ignorance of facts, failed to realize the impossibility of what she upheld. No, no, it was out of the question.