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 was not mortal.  Ford had been born in Illinois; and so, something better than a third of a century earlier, had the president.  Moreover, Mr. Colbrith had, in the hey-day of his youth, shared rooms with the elder Ford in the fresh-water university which had later numbered the younger Ford among its alumni.  These things count for somewhat, even when the gap to be bridged is that between the president of a railroad and one of his minor officials.

But when the revolutionary project was introduced, the president’s guarded cordiality faded like a photographic proof-print in the sunlight, and the air of the darkened library grew coldly inclement.

“So you came to talk business, did you?” said the high, rasping voice out of the depths of the easy-chair opposite; and Ford raged inwardly at the thought that he had clearly placed himself at a disadvantage by becoming even constructively the guest of the president.  “As a rule, I positively refuse to discuss such matters outside of their proper environment; but I’ll make an exception for Douglas Ford’s son.  Your plan is simply impossible.  I can understand how it may appear possible, and even attractive, to a young man, and especially to the young man who has invented it.  But as an investment for capital—­my dear young sir, go back to your division, and strive by faithful service to rise in the accepted and time-honored way.  You are wasting your time in New York.”