t shadows stretch away to void. There was time
to see the drabness of his boarding place, so he changed it. The
change cost him more money and left him more leisure. He took his
meals wherever he happened to be. The town was full of people, kindly
enough, but each with his own circle of interests. To some of these he
sold motor cars. There would be a short period of contact, then that
would pass and the customer would slip into the whirlpool of casuality
and be swept away. None of the relationships seemed to last. Each one
left him more alone than ever.

He ran across Mrs. LeMasters. Mrs. LeMasters was an ancient lady with
a penchant for lavender. The day he called on her she was wearing a
flowered dress with a sash, with bits of lace about the neck and
cuffs. She put on a bonnet of lavender straw before the glass in her
front hall and bound it to her by yards of voluminous cream tulle,
wrapped under her chin and about her neck with trembling fingers.

"Does it blow much in your car?" she called to him in a quavery voice.

He assured her that it was quite desirably calm.

"The Stokes car is most delightful," she said. "Just like sitting in
my own room. Not the sign of a bump--and I could not realize we had
been going twenty-five miles an hour."

He smiled politely. "We'll see what this one will do."

"I've been struggling to keep off this evil hour for, oh, so long,"
she explained as she followed him timidly down the walk to the curb.
"It was a terrible thing when the world went mad for haste and now has
to be jerked around from place to place without ever drawing a sane
breath. I've two horses and three carriages, one a Victoria that I
bought in Paris. What am I going lo do with these if I buy your car,
Mr. Hooper? Oh, what a pretty car!"

She narrowed her sharp little eyes--she was quite near sighted--and
stepped out into the street and around the rear of the automobile,
caught sight of her image in the back panel, came around and felt of
the leather in the seat, rubbed the polished surface of the bow
socket as though she had bought motors for years. Then she turned to
Joe: "And the engine? Is it a good engine?"

"It is guaranteed to be the best." And then he went on quietly to tell
her a few of the more spectacular things about it. He did not overdo
it.

As he was speaking she was watching his face with a dreamy, vague
expression on her wrinkled features. When he had finished, she
brightened and laid her h