-you can shut me up if you like--what's it
all about? Can you tell me that?" Howat Penny couldn't. "I'm not to
blame for that old mess any more than you. And it's not my fault if
something of--of which you think so much came to me by the back door.
I've always wanted what Mariana is," he burst out, "and I have never
been satisfied with what I could get. And when I saw her, hell--what's
the use!

"Any one in Harrisburg will tell you I am a good man," he reiterated, at
a slightly different angle. "When you kick through out of that racket of
hunkies and steel you've done something. Soon I'll be getting five or
six thousand." He paused, and the other said dryly, "Admirable." The
phrase seemed to him inadequate; it sounded in his ear as unpleasantly
as a false note. Yet he was powerless to alter it, change its brusque
accent. The personal tone of Polder's revelations was inherently
distasteful to him. He said, rising, "If you will excuse me I'll tell
Rudolph you will be here."

"But I won't," Polder replied; "there's a train back at eleven. I have
to be at the mills for the day shift to-morrow. I came out because I
had to talk a little about Mariana." He had deserted the more formal
address. "And I wanted to tell some one connected with her that I have
gimp of my own. I know why she won't marry me, and it's a small reason;
it would be small in--"

"Hold up," Howat Penny interrupted, incensed. "Am I to understand that
you came here to complain about Miss Jannan's conduct? That won't do,
you know."

"It's a small reason," the other insisted hotly. "Hardly more than the
idiotic fact that I'm not in the Social Register. I am ashamed of her,
and I said so. It was so little that I told her I wouldn't argue. She
could go to the devil."

"Really," the other observed, "really, I shall have to ask you to
control your language or leave."

"I wonder if she will?" the surprising James Polder sombrely speculated.
"I wonder if I am? But there are other women, with better hearts."

"Are we to construe this as a threat?" Howat asked in a delicately
balanced tone.

"For God's sake," he begged, "can't you be human!" The other suddenly
recalled Mariana's imploring anger at the Polders. "Don't be so rotten,
Howat." The confusion of his valuations, his habitual attitudes of
thought, returned. His gaze strayed to the obscured ruin of Shadrach
Furnace, at once a monument of departed vigour and present
disintegration. Perhaps, just as the