dignity of its own, impressive only as the product of rigid measurements
and mechanical uprightness.

From the boulevard there was a gravelled driveway with a stone portal.
The iron gates were thrown wide, and at his entrance Ford stood aside to
let an outgoing auto-car have the right of way. Being full of his
errand, and of the abstraction of a depressed soul, Ford merely remarked
that there were two persons in the car; a young man driving, and a young
woman, veiled and dust-coated, in the mechanician's seat beside him.
None the less, there floated out of the mist of abstraction an instantly
vanishing phantom of half-recognition for the Westerner. Something in
the pose of the young woman, the way she leaned forward and held her hat
with the tips of her gloved fingers, was, for the fleeting moment,
almost reminiscent.

If Ford had wished to speculate upon abstruse problems of identity,
there was neither time nor the mental aptitude. A little later he had
given his card to the servant at the door and was waiting in a darkened
and most depressive library for the coming of the master of the house.
The five minutes of waiting nearly finished him. As the absurdly formal
clock between the book-cases ticked off the leaden-winged seconds, his
plan for the rescue of Pacific Southwestern took the form of a crass
impertinence, and only the grim determination to see a lost cause
decently coffined and buried kept the enthusiast with his face to the
front.

After all, the beginning of the interview with the tall, thin,
gray-haired and hatchet-faced old man, who presently stalked into the
library and gave his hand with carefully adjusted cordiality to the son
of one of his college classmates, was only a little more depressing: it