“Perhaps, Howat,” she answered gravely.  “I have only seen him twice; and he has said nothing; but, you see, I am an experienced young woman.  No other man has made the same impression.”

“That,” he declared coldly, “is unthinkable.  You can’t know all the facts.”

“I do; but, somehow, I don’t care.”

“Everything about him is impossible—­his history, family ...  Why, Eunice Scofield, well, Penny, married a man from behind a counter, a fellow who sold womens’ gloves; yes, and more than half Jew.  And this man’s mother was Delia Mullen, a daughter of the dirty ward leader.  All this aside from—­from his bad blood.”

“It’s partly yours, you know,” she said quietly.  “After all, there are other places I can see him.”  She turned away.  “Eliza Provost is insane,” he muttered.  “No,” Mariana returned, “only superior to narrow little prejudices.  She can see life, people, as they are.  Jim Polder is one of the most promising men in the steel mills.  He is going up and up.  That is enough for Eliza, it is enough for me; and if it won’t do for my family—­” she made an opening gesture with her fingers.  Her expression had hardened; she gazed at him with bright, contemptuous eyes.  In a moment the affectionate bonds between them seemed to have dissolved.  His feeling was one of mingled anger and concern; but he endeavoured to regain his self-control, conscious that a hasty word more might do irreparable harm.

“Of course, I can’t have you meeting him about the streets,” he stated.  “It is better here, if necessary.  I am very much displeased,” a note of complaint appeared, and she immediately returned to him, laid a hand on his shoulder.  “Nothing is certain,” she assured him.  “I wanted to be sure, that is all.  I don’t want to make a mess out of things.”

It was a part of the very quality of emotional courage he had so lately defined, extolled; a part of her disdain for ordinary prudence and conventional approbation.  A direct dislike for this James Polder invaded him, a determined attitude of hyper-criticism.  When the younger man reappeared Howat Penny found justification for this attitude.  The details of Polder’s apparel, although acceptable in the main, were without nicety.  His shoes were a crude tan, and his necktie from the outer limbo.  His hands, too, had a grimy surface and the nails were broken, unkempt.

But it was evident that all the criticism was not to be limited to his own.  James Polder regarded the single glass with a scoffing lip, as if it were the appendage of a ludicrous Anglomania.  He glanced with indifference at Howat Penny’s pictures, books, the collected emblems of his cultivated years.  His brows raised at the photograph of Scalchi in the Page’s trunks—­as if, the elder thought, she had been a “pony” in the Black Crook—­and was visibly amused at the great Mapleson, posed in a dignified attitude by a broken column.  An irrepressible and biting scorn, Howat Penny saw, was, perhaps, the young man’s strongest attribute.  He had violent opinions expressed in sudden, sharp movements, gestures with his shoulders, swift frowns and fragmentary sentences.