“And you, too,” he said to the elder, with a crushing grip.  Howat immediately recognized that the other was marked by an obvious ill health; his eyes were hung with shadows, like smudges of the iron dust, and his palm was hot and wet.  “Harriet,” he called up the stair, “here’s Miss Jannan and Mr. Howat Penny to see us.”  A complete silence above, then a sharp rustle, replied to his announcement.  “Harriet will be right down,” he continued; “fixing herself up a little first.  Have trouble finding us?  Second Street is high for a foreman, but we’re moving out against the future.”

The dog maintained a stridulous barking; and James Polder carried her, in an ecstasy of snarling ill-temper, out.  “Cherette doesn’t appreciate callers,” he stated, with an expression that contradicted the mildness of his words.  His gaze, Howat thought, rested on Mariana with the intensity of a fanatic Arab at the apparition of Mohammed.  And Mariana smiled back with a penetrating comprehension and sympathy.  The proceeding made Howat Penny extremely uncomfortable; it was—­was barefaced.  He hoped desperately that something more appropriately casual would meet the appearance of Harriet.  Mariana said: 

“You haven’t been well.”  Polder replied that it was nothing.  “I get a night shift,” he explained, “and I’ve never learned to sleep through the day.  We’re working under unusual pressure, too; inhuman contracts, success.”  He smiled without gaiety.  “You didn’t answer my letter,” the outrageous Mariana proceeded.  Howat withered mentally at her cool daring, and Polder, now flushed, avoided her gaze.  The necessity of answer was bridged by the descent of his wife.  Her face, as always, brightly coloured, was framed in an instinctively effective twist of gold hair; and she wore an elaborately braided, white cloth skirt, a magenta georgette crepe waist, with a deep, boyish collar, drawn tightly across her full, soft body.

“Isn’t it fierce,” she demanded cheerfully, “with Jim out as many nights as he’s in bed?” She produced a pasteboard package of popular cigarettes and offered them to Howat Penny and Mariana.  “Sorry, I can’t smoke any others,” she explained, striking a match.  “I heard you saying he doesn’t look right,” she addressed Mariana.  “And it’s certainly the truth.  Who would with what he does?  I tell him our life is all broke up.  One night stands used to get me, but they’re a metropolitan run compared with this.  Honest to God,” she told them good naturedly, “I’ve threatened to leave him already.  I’d rather see him a property man with me on the road.”

“It must be a little wearing,” Mariana agreed; “but then, you know, your husband is a steel man.  This is his life.”  Howat Penny could see the cordiality ebbing from the other woman’s countenance.  Positively, Mariana ought to be ...  “I can get that,” Harriet Polder informed her.  “We are only hanging on till Jim’s made superintendent.  Then we’ll be regular inhabitants.  Any