"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.
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