“We will go together,” she proceeded calmly.  “I want to see Jim married, happy.”  She gazed at him with narrowed eyes.

“Mariana,” he told her, “that’s a shameful lie.  It is cold, feminine curiosity.  It’s worse—­the only vulgar thing I can remember your considering.  I won’t hear of it.”  He debated the wisdom of recounting James Polder’s last visit to Shadrach and decided in the negative.  “Let the young man depart with his Harriet in peace.”

“It’s sickening, isn’t it?” she queried.  “And yet it is so like Jim.  He had a very objectional idea of his dignity; he was sensitive in a way that made me impatient.  He couldn’t forget himself, you see.  That helped to make it difficult for me; I wasn’t used to it; his feelings were always being damaged.”

Howat Penny nodded.  “You’ll recall I emphasized that.”  Mariana looked worn by her gaiety, he decided, white; for the first time in his memory she seemed older than her actual years.  Her friends, he knew, her existence, bore the general appellation, fast; Howat had no share in the condemnatory aspect of the term, but he realized that it had a literal application.  Their pace was feverish, and Mariana plainly showed its effects.  Her voice, already noted as more mature, had, he was sure, hardened.  She dabbled her lips thickly with a rouge stick.  “Mariana,” he said querulously, “I wish, you’d stop this puppet dance you’re leading.  I wish you would marry.”

“I tried to,” she coolly replied, “but you spoiled my young dream of happiness.”

“That isn’t true,” he asserted sharply, perturbed.  “Anything that happened, or didn’t happen, was only the result of yourself, of what you are.  I am extremely anxious to have you settled, and your legs out of the Sunday papers.  I—­I am opposed to your present existence; it’s gone on too long.  I believe I’d rather see you orating on the streets, like Eliza Provost.  And, by thunder, I never thought I should come to that!  Champagne and those damnable syncopated tunes played by hysterical niggers make a poor jig.”  He spoke impetuously, unconscious of any reversal of previous judgments, opinions.

“You are so difficult to please, Howat,” she said wearily; “you were aghast at the thought of my marrying James, and now you are complaining of the natural alternative.  The truth is,” she added brutally, “you are old-fashioned; you think life goes on just as it did when the Academy of Music was the centre of your world.  And nothing is the same.”  She rose, and, with a lighted cigarette and half-shut eyes, fell into a rhythmic step of sensuous abandon.  “You see,” she remarked, pausing.  An increasing dread for her filled his heart.  He felt, in response to her challenge, a sudden bewilderment in the world of to-day.  Things, Howat Penny told himself, were marching to the devil.  He said this irritably, loud, and she laughed.  “I’m going in by an early train,” she proceeded.  “We have left the country.  Will you stop for me on the thirtieth?  Early, Howat, so we can be sure of a good place.”