And Thompson was duly sent up.  He did not go back to the shop on the top floor where for six months he had been an eager student, where he had learned something of the labor of creation—­for Fred Henderson was evolving a new car, a model that should have embodied in it power and looks and comfort at the minimum of cost.  And in pursuance of that ideal he built and discarded, redesigned and rebuilt, putting his motors to the acid test on the block and his assembled chassis on the road.  Indeed, many a wild ride he and Thompson had taken together on quiet highways outside of San Francisco during that testing process.

No, Thompson never went back to that after his interview with John P. Henderson.  He was sorry, in a way.  He liked the work.  It was fascinating to put shafting and gears and a motor and a set of insentient wheels together and make the assembled whole a thing of pulsing power that leaped under the touch of a finger.  But—­a good salesman made thousands where a good mechanic made hundreds.  And money was the indispensable factor—­to such as he, who had none.

Fred Henderson had the satisfaction of seeing his theory verified.  Thompson made good from the start.  In three months his sales were second in volume only to Monk White, who was John P.’s one best bet in the selling line.  Henderson chuckled afresh over this verification of his original estimate of a man, and Fred Henderson smiled and said nothing.  From either man’s standpoint Wes Thompson was a credit to the house.  An asset, besides, of reckonable value in cold cash.

“New blood counts,” John P. rumbled in confidence to his son.  “Keeps us from going stale, Fred.”

When a twelvemonth had elapsed from the day Sophie Carr’s red roadster blew a tire on the San Mateo road and set up that sequence of events which had landed him where he was, Thompson had left his hall bedroom at the Globe for quarters in a decent bachelor apartment.  He had a well-stocked wardrobe, a dozen shelves of miscellaneous books, and three thousand dollars in the bank.  Considering his prospects he should have been a fairly sanguine and well-contented young man.

As a matter of fact he had become so, within certain limits.  A man whose time is continuously and profitably occupied does not brood.  Thompson had found a personal satisfaction in living up to John P. Henderson’s first judgment of him.  Through Fred Henderson and through his business activities he had formed a little group of pleasant acquaintances.  Sophie Carr was growing shadowy—­a shadow that sometimes laid upon him certain regrets, it is true, but the mere memory of her no longer produced the old overpowering reactions, the sense of sorry failure, of a dear treasure lost because he lacked a man’s full stature in all but physical bulk.