ad 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 o