“Perhaps,” he returned cautiously.  “A good many years have shown me that the right man usually wears the right things.”

“Couldn’t that be just the smallest bit unfair?  Aren’t there, after all, droves of the right men in rubber collars?  I don’t know any,” she added hastily; “that is, not exactly the same.  But it seems to me that you have lived so exclusively in a certain atmosphere that you might have got blinded to—­to other things.”

“Perhaps,” he said again, complacently.  “I can only judge by my own feeling and experience.  Now Mapleson, never was a finer conductor of opera—­you didn’t catch him in a pink tie in the evening.  And some of those others, who failed in a couple of weeks, I give you my word, dress shirts with forgetmenots.”

She regarded him with a frowning, half closed vision.  “It sounds wrong,” she commented.  “It’s been your life, of course.”  He grew resentful under her scrutiny, the implied criticism.  A sudden suspicion entered his mind, connected with her expression last evening, the young man whose name he had omitted to ask.  His reluctance to question her returned.  But if Mariana had attached herself to some rowdy, by heaven, he would....  He fixed the glass in his eye, and, pretending to be occupied with a periodical, studied her.  He realized that he would, could, do nothing.  She was a woman of determination, and, her father dead, a very adequate income of her own.  His fondness for Mariana resided principally in a wish to see her free from the multitudinous snares that he designated in a group as common.  He was fearful of her entanglement in the cheap implications of the undistinguished democracy more prevalent every year.  All that was notable, charming, in her, he felt, would be obliterated by trite connection; he had no more patience for the conventional fulfilment of her life than he had for the thought of women voting.  Howat Penny saw Mariana complete, fine, in herself, as the Orpheo of Christopher Gluck was fine and complete.  He preferred the contained artistry of such music to the cruder, more popular and moral, sounds.

Early in the afternoon she went to her room, although Honduras had no occasion to go to the station for considerably more than an hour, explaining that she must dress.  Howat Penny sat with his palms on his white flannelled knees, revolving, now, himself in the light of his aspirations for Mariana.  He wondered if, in the absence of any sympathy for the mass of sentiment and living, he was blind, too, to her greatest possibilities; if, in short, he was a vicious influence.  Perhaps, as the old were said to do, he had hardened into a narrow and erroneous conception of values.  Such doubts were both disturbing and unusual; ordinarily he never hesitated in the exact expression of his vigorously held opinions and prejudices; he seldom relaxed the critical elevation of his standards.  He was, he thought contemptuously, growing soft; senility was diluting his fibre, blurring his inner vision.