“A degree of perception is always admirable,” Howat Penny instructed him.  “That’s a nasty one,” Polder acknowledged; “but I got into it myself.  I can see that.”  His hand, seared with labour, was pressed on the table; and the elder realized that, since he had witnessed a heat tapped, he was not so censorious of the broken nails, the lines of indelible black.  He caught James Polder’s gaze, and turned from its intense questioning.  Young cheeks had no business to be so gaunt.  Polder picked up the figurine in red clay, studied it with a troubled brow, and replaced it with a gesture of hopelessness.  “Possibly,” Howat Penny unexpectedly remarked, “possibly you find beauty in a piece of open hearth steel.”

“It’s useful,” Polder declared; “it has a tensile strength.  I know what it will do.  This,” he indicated the fragment of a grace razed over twenty-three hundred years before, “is good for nothing that I see.”  Now, Howat told himself, it was merely a question of tensile strength.  His old enthusiasms, his passionate admiration for the operas of Christopher Gluck, the enthusiasms and admirations of his kind, were being pushed aside for things of more obvious practicality.  The very term that had distinguished his world, men of breeding, had been discarded.  Individuals like James Polder, blunt of speech, contemptuous, labour scarred, were paramount to-day.

His thoughts, he realized, were a part of the questioning thrust on him by the intrusion of Mariana’s unfortunate affair into his old age.  She was always dragging him to a perplexing spectacle for which he had neither energy nor inclination.  But he’d be damned if he would allow the importunities of the young man beyond the table to complicate further his difficulties, and he retired abruptly behind the Saturday Review.  “You’d better get along up,” he said brusquely, after a little.

Breakfast at an end, they settled into a not uncomfortable, mutual silence.  They smoked; James Polder unfolded newspapers which he neglected to read; Howat went through the periodicals with audible expressions of displeasure.  He wondered when Mariana would appear.  Mariana made a fool of him, that was evident; however, he would put his foot on any philandering about Shadrach.  He could be as blunt as James Polder when the occasion demanded.  After lunch the latter fell asleep in his chair on the porch, pallidly insensible of the sparkling flood of afternoon.  Howat rose and went into the house.  It was indecent to see a countenance so wearily unguarded, shorn of all protective aggression.  Mariana walked in unannounced.

“Why didn’t you telephone for Honduras?” he complained.  “Always some infernal difference in what you do.”  She frowned.  “Suddenly,” she admitted, “I wasn’t in a hurry to get here.  I almost went back.  Idiotic.”

“Sensible, it seems to me,” he commented.  “That Polder is asleep on the porch.”  She nodded, “Splendid.  And you needn’t try to look fierce.  I can see through you and out the back.”  He lit a cigarette angrily.  “Going to stay for the night?” he demanded.  “Several,” she replied coolly.  “Three can play sniff.”