melted into pity. Passionate resolves to shed him and his blue abomination
died within her as she watched his struggles. His whole future depended,
he said, on the Model. If Mrs. May should throw him over and hire another
car, the news would fly like lightning from garage to garage of Los
Angeles; indeed, from end to end of California. He would be ruined. His
mother, who had been forbidden excitement, would, without doubt, die of
heart failure.

The heart of Angela failed also, again and yet again. She began to see
that Mr. Sealman had cast himself for the part of Old Man of the Sea, in a
travel drama of which she was heroine. She felt alone in the world. "It
will probably end in my having to buy the little blue brute and burn it,"
she thought. "But even then the codfish will probably insist on being my
butler."

These gloomy forebodings shadowed her mind one morning when the Model
broke down about half a mile from fantastic little Venice, the Coney
Island of South California. In a rage she got out and walked, past a
kaleidoscopic pattern of tiny bazaars, shooting-galleries, paper icebergs,
and cardboard mountains. She threaded her way through a good-natured crowd
of tall, tanned young Americans, pretty girls with wonderful erections of
golden hair, dark-faced Mexicans, yellow-faced Japanese, a few Hindus and
negroes. Then, by the pier, she saw an old Spanish galleon disguised as a
restaurant, and drifted in to lunch on fried sand-dabs attractively
advertised in big black letters. How old, how Spanish, and how galleon
the craft might really be, none could tell--or would. But the sand-dabs
were delicious; and from the queer window near her table--a window cut in
the ship's side--she could see the Pacific, blue in distance, green where
it tossed white foam-blossoms on a beach of gold.