Howat Penny saw Mariana complete, fine, in herself, as the _Orpheo_ of
Christopher Gluck was fine and complete. He preferred the contained
artistry of such music to the cruder, more popular and moral, sounds.
Early in the afternoon she went to her room, although Honduras had no
occasion to go to the station for considerably more than an hour,
explaining that she must dress. Howat Penny sat with his palms on his
white flannelled knees, revolving, now, himself in the light of his
aspirations for Mariana. He wondered if, in the absence of any sympathy
for the mass of sentiment and living, he was blind, too, to her greatest
possibilities; if, in short, he was a vicious influence. Perhaps, as the
old were said to do, he had hardened into a narrow and erroneous
conception of values. Such doubts were both disturbing and unusual;
ordinarily he never hesitated in the exact expression of his vigorously
held opinions and prejudices; he seldom relaxed the critical elevation
of his standards. He was, he thought contemptuously, growing soft;
senility was diluting his fibre, blurring his inner vision.
Nothing of this was visible as he rose on Mariana's reappearance; there
was not a line relaxed; his handsome, dark profile was as pridefully
clear as if it had been stamped on a bronze coin.
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