He was a large man, past the zenith of life, but still vigorous in features and action. His face was full, and, wet from the heat, he mopped it with a heavy linen handkerchief. August Turnbull's gaze was steady and light blue; his nose was so heavy that it appeared to droop a little from sheer weight, almost resting on the mustache brushed out in a horizontal line across prominent lips; while his neck swelled in a glowing congestion above a wilting collar. He nodded to several men in the narrow corridor of the car; men like himself in luxurious summer clothes, but for the most part fatter; then in the shed, looking about in vain for Bernard, his son-in-law, he proceeded to the street, where his automobile was waiting. It was a glittering landaulet, folded back and open. Thrusting a wadded evening paper into a crevice he sank in an upholstered corner while his chauffeur skillfully worked out through a small confusion of similar motor activity. Before him a carved glass vase set in a bracket held smilax and yellow rosebuds, and he saw on the floor a fallen gold powder box. Picking it up his face was suffused by a darker tide; this was the result of stooping and the angry realization that in spite of his prohibition Louise had been using the landaulet again. She must be made to understand that he, her father, had an absolute authority over his family and property. Marriage to Bernard Foster did not relieve her from obedience to the head of the house. Bernard had a car as well as himself; yet August Turnbull knew that his son-in-law--at heart a stingy man--encouraged her to burn the parental gasoline in place of his own. Turned against the public Bernard's special quality was admirable; he was indeed more successful, richer, than August had been at the other's age; but Louise and her husband would have to recognize his precedence. They were moving faster now on a broad paved avenue bound with steel tracks. A central business section was left for a more unpretentious region--small open fruit and fish stands, dingy lodging places, drab corner saloons, with, at the intervals of the cross streets, fleet glimpses of an elevated boardwalk and the luminous space of the sea. Though the day was ending there was no thinning of the vaporous heat, and a sodden humanity, shapeless in bathing suits, was still reluctantly moving away from the beach. Groups of women with their hair in trailing wet wisps and short uneven skirts dripping on the pavements, gaunt children in scant haphazard garb surged across the broad avenue or with shrill admonishments stood in isolated helpless patches amid the swift and shining procession of automobiles. August Turnbull was disturbed by the sudden arrest of his progress, and gazing out saw the insignificant cause of delay. He had again removed his hat and a frown drew a visible heavy line between his eyes.