After dinner the younger man faced him squarely across the apricot glow of the lamp in the middle room. "This is the third time I've come here without an invitation from you," he said directly. "It was Mariana this last. I shut my mouth on what I'd once have crammed down your throat, and came like any puppy. It wasn't on account of my health, there are miles of quiet country; it wasn't--" he hesitated, then went on--"altogether because of Mariana. I wanted to watch you closer; I want to find out what you are like inside, so I might understand some--some other things better. I can get out if it's a rank failure." Howat issued a polite, general dissent. "Now, right there," Polder stated; "you don't want me; you'd rather I was a thousand miles away, dead. Well--why don't you say so?" He had not the least conception of a decent reticence of address, Howat Penny thought, resentfully, at the discomfort aroused by the young man's sharp attack. "Certain amenities," he observed coldly, "have been accepted as desirable, as obligations for--" he hesitated, casting about for a phrase that would not too conspicuously exclude James Polder. "Say it," the latter burst out rudely, "gentlemen. And you all stand about with one thing to say and another in your head." "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.