When he went down the guests had arrived. His mother presented him,
using proudly her formula for such meetings, "Our son." Somehow it
always made him feel like an inanimate object of virtue--as if she
had said "our Rembrandt," or, "our Chippendale sideboard."

Mrs. Lightener did not impress him. Here was a quiet, motherly
personality, a personality to grow upon one through months and years.
At first meeting she seemed only a gray-haired, shy, silent sort of
person, not to be spoken of by herself as Mrs. Lightener, but in the
reflected rays of her husband, as Malcolm Lightener's wife.

But Malcolm Lightener--he dominated the room as the Laocoon group
would dominate a ten by twelve "parlor." His size was only a minor
element in that impression. True, he was as great in bulk as
Bonbright and his father rolled in one, towering inches above them,
and they were tall men. It was the jagged, dynamic, granite
personality of him that jutted out to meet one almost with physical
impact. You were conscious of meeting a force before you became
conscious of meeting a man. And yet, when you came to study his face
you found it wonderfully human-even with a trace of granite humor in
it.

Bonbright was really curious to meet this man, whose story had
reached him even in Harvard University. Here was a man who, in ten
years of such dogged determination as affected one almost with awe,
had turned a vision into concrete reality. In a day when the only
mechanical vehicles upon our streets were trolley cars, he had seen
those streets thronged with "horseless carriages." He had seen
streets packed from curb to curb with endless moving processions of
them. He had seen the nation abandon its legs and take to motor-