“It won’t damage you,” she replied indirectly.  Already, he thought with poignant regret, a part of the old Mariana had gone; her voice was older, darker with maturity.

XXVI

Howat Penny arrived in town late on the day when he was to dine with Mariana at the Polders.  He entered a taxicab, and was carried smoothly through the thick, hot air; open electric cars, ladened with damp, pallid salespeople, passed with a harsh ringing; and the foliage in Rittenhouse Square hung dusty and limp and still.  The houses beyond, on Nineteenth Street, where the Jannans’ winter dwelling stood, were closed and blankly boarded.  The small, provisional entrance before which he stopped opened, and a servant, out of livery, appeared.  “Shall I tell the driver to return, sir?” he queried; “the telephone is disconnected.”  He issued instructions, and, with Howat Penny’s bag, followed him into the darkened house.

The windows of a general chamber on the second floor had been thrown open; and there he found Mariana’s brother.  Kingsfrere Jannan was a young man with a broad white face, shadowed in pasty green, and leaden eyes.  His countenance, Howat knew, masked a keen and avaricious temperament.  He did uncommonly well at auction bridge in the clubs.  Kingsfrere, in a grey morning coat with white linen gaiters and a relentless collar, nodded and lounged from the room; and Mariana soon appeared.  “Perhaps, Howat,” she said, “it would be better if you didn’t dress.  I have an idea the Polder men don’t.”

At the stubborn expression which possessed him she exclaimed sharply, “If you tell me that the Colonel or Gary Dilkes were always formally dressed at dinner I think I’ll scream.”  Nevertheless, he had no intention of relinquishing a habit of years for the Polders, or the north end of the city; and when, later, he came down into the hall, where the man stood with his silk hat and cape, Mariana put an arm about his shoulders.  “I wish every one could he as beautiful as yourself,” she told him.  They passed the Square, bathed in dusk and the beginning shimmer of arc lights, went through the flattened and faintly thunderous arch of a railway, and turned into a broad asphalt street, on which wide, glistening bulk windows gave place to sombre shops with lurid, flame-streaked vistas, and continuous residences beyond.  Howat Penny gazed curiously at the tall, narrow dwellings, often a continuous, similar facade from street corner to corner, then diversified in elaborate, individual design.  All, however, had deep stone steps leading to the sidewalk, thronged with figures in airy white dresses, coatless men smoking contentedly; there was a constant light vibration of laughing voices and subdued calling, and the fainter strains of mechanical music, the beat of popular marches and attenuated voices of celebrated singers.