When the younger man
reappeared Howat Penny found justification for this attitude. The
details of Polder's apparel, although acceptable in the main, were
without nicety. His shoes were a crude tan, and his necktie from the
outer limbo. His hands, too, had a grimy surface and the nails were
broken, unkempt.
But it was evident that all the criticism was not to be limited to his
own. James Polder regarded the single glass with a scoffing lip, as if
it were the appendage of a ludicrous Anglomania. He glanced with
indifference at Howat Penny's pictures, books, the collected emblems of
his cultivated years. His brows raised at the photograph of Scalchi in
the Page's trunks--as if, the elder thought, she had been a "pony" in
the _Black Crook_--and was visibly amused at the great Mapleson, posed
in a dignified attitude by a broken column. An irrepressible and biting
scorn, Howat Penny saw, was, perhaps, the young man's strongest
attribute. He had violent opinions expressed in sudden, sharp movements,
gestures with his shoulders, swift frowns and fragmentary sentences.
Howat Penny had never seen a more ill-ordered youth, and he experienced
an increasing difficulty in keeping a marked asperity from his speech
and conduct.
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