It was, Howat thought, just such an ill-bred utterance as he had looked for from Byron Polder; and he made no effort to mitigate it.  He was conscious of, and resolutely ignored, Mariana’s veiled entreaty.  “You don’t know my girls,” Mrs. Polder continued rapidly.  “Here is Isabella, and Kate will be along for dinner.”  A tall, bony woman of, perhaps, thirty-five, in an appalling complication of ribbons and silk, moved forward with a conventional sentence.  In her, Howat’s appraisements went on, virginity had been perpetuated in a captious obsession.  They stood awkwardly silent until James Polder exclaimed, “Good heavens, this isn’t a wax works!  Why don’t we sit down?” The older woman glanced with a consuming anxiety at Isabella, and nodded violently toward an exit, “It’s a quarter after seven,” she said in a swift aside.  Isabella, correctly disposed on a chair of muffled and mysterious line, resolutely ignored the appeal.

“I didn’t suppose you’d be in the city,” she addressed Mariana; “I read in the paper that you had gone to Watch Hill with Mrs. Ledyard B. Starr.”

“You can see that I’m back,” Mariana smiled.  “The family, of course, are at Andalusia, but we have all been in town the past days.  I am really staying with Howat at Shadrach.”

“The former location of Shadrach Furnace, I believe,” Byron Polder stated.  “Now in ruins.”  Howat Penny accurately gathered that the other inferred the collapse not only of the Furnace.  He secured the single glass in his eye and looked deliberately around.  Isabella watched him with a tense interest.  Mrs. Polder gave a short, perturbed giggle.  “Just like George Arliss,” she told her son.  James Polder, on the edge of a chair, was twitching with repressed uneasiness; he frowned antagonistically and then gazed appealingly at Mariana.  “I have been introduced to your cousin, Miss Provost,” Isabella again took up her social thread.  “A dear friend of mine, a talented actress, gave a recitation at Miss Provost’s request, for suffrage.”

“Eliza’s splendid,” Mariana pronounced.

“Peter Jannan Provost’s daughter,” Byron Polder added fully.  But his voice indicated that even more, darkly unfavourable, might be revealed.  “Miss Provost has been under arrest.”  Damn the solemn ass, Howat Penny thought.  “She’s been in the jug twice now,” Mariana went on cheerfully; “Kingsfrere had to put up a bond the last time.”  Mrs. Polder was rapidly regaining her ease.  “Wasn’t her mamma scared?” she inquired.  “I’d go on if Isabella was taken up.”

“Imagine Isabella!” Jim Polder exploded.  “It’s quite the thing,” that individual asserted.  “Isabella,” her mother declared, “it is twenty-five past seven.  I wish you’d go out and see where dinner is.”  She rose with an expression of mingled surprise and pain.  “Really, mother,” she said, “that is an extraordinary request.”  Her brother snorted.  There was a sudden muffled clamour of chimes from below, and Mrs. Polder gave a sigh of relief.  “I didn’t want it spoiled,” she explained, descending; “Jim would be wild after all his eagerness to have things nice.”