“But I’m not decent either,” Mariana continued.  “If you could know what is in my head you’d recognize that.  I seem to have no good qualities.  I don’t want them, Howat,” her voice intensified; “I want Jim.”

He was completely silenced by this desire persisting in spite of every established obstacle.  It summoned an increasing response at the core of his being.  Such an attitude was, more remotely, his own; but in him it had been purely negative, an inhibition rather than a challenge; he had kept out of life instead of actively defying it.  In him the family inheritance of blackness was subsiding with the rest.

Howat maintained until the moment of their departure his protest, his perverse community with Harriet Polder.  “You’ll find a happy house,” he predicted, “and come home like a fool.  I hope you do.  It ought to help make you more reasonable.  She will tell James to give you a comfortable chair, and apologize for not asking you to dinner.”  She gazed through the car window without replying.  He realized that he had never seen Mariana more becomingly dressed—­she wore a rough, silver-coloured suit with a short jacket, a pale green straw hat, like the new willow leaves, across the blueness of her eyes, and an innumerably ruffled and flounced waist of thinnest batiste.  A square, deep emerald hung from a platinum chain about her neck; and a hand, stripped of its thick white glove, showed an oppressive, prismatic glitter of diamonds.

The morning was filled with dense, low, grey cloud, under which the river on their left flowed without a glimmer of brightness.  Howat was aware of an increasing sulphurous pall, and suddenly the train was passing an apparently endless confusion of great, corrugated iron sheds, rows of towering, smoking stacks, enormous, black cylinders, systems of tracks over which shrilling locomotives hauled carloads of broken slag, or bumped strings of trucks, with reckless energy, in and out of the grimy interiors.  The overpowering magnitude of the steel works—­Howat Penny needed no assurance of its purpose—­exceeded every preconception.

Shut between the river and an abrupt hillside, where scattered dwellings and sparse trees and ground were coated with a soft monotony of rose-brown dust, the mills were jumbled in mile-long perspectives.  Above the immediate noise of the train he could hear the sullen, blended roar of an infinity of strident sounds—­the screaming of whistles, a choked, drumming thunder, rushing blasts of air, the shattering impact of steel rails, raw steam, and a multitudinous clangour of metal and jolting wheels and connective power.  He passed rusting mountains straddled by giant gantries, the towering lifts of mammoth cranes, banks of chalk-white stone, dizzy super-structures mounted by spasmodic skips.

As the train proceeded with scarcely abated speed, and the vast operation continued without a break, mill on mill, file after file of stacks, Howat Penny’s senses were crushed by the spectacle of such incredible labour.  Suddenly a column of fire, deep orange at the core, raying through paler yellow to a palpitating white brilliancy, shot up through the torn vapours, the massed and shuddering smoke, to the clouds, and was sharply withdrawn in a coppery smother pierced by a rapid, lance-like thrust of steel-blue flame.