“Still dancing on the tight-rope!” Harlan laughed. “He’s got his car line through the Addition—I understand your father explodes completely whenever it’s mentioned to him—but Dan’s spending fortunes on new streets and sewers and what not. He’s actually trying to open a big tract still farther out, north of Ornaby; and I don’t believe he’s able to keep money in his hands long enough to go into building cars. You’d _think_ he’s building them though, if you’d listen to him! He talks about the ‘Ornaby Car’ to everybody; I suppose he believes it’s a lucky name. He _has_ got his Addition booming though—no question. He’s making the countryside more and more horrible every day. It’s much worse than it was last year.” “How is it horrible?” “I could tell you, but it’s ten to one that if I merely told you, you’d become Ornaby’s defender—you’re so everlastingly its defender! I’d rather show you, if you’d take me as a passenger in this jewelled palanquin of yours to-morrow.” Martha assented, and the next afternoon her neat young mechanic drove them northward over the road once travelled on a hot and threatening morning by a “rubber-tired runabout” in which sat a disappointed little bride and a perplexed bridegroom. On that dusty morning, already of the long ago, the way had soon become rustic; the cedar-block paving, itself worn and jolty, had stopped short not much more than a mile from its beginning; then came macadam, but not for long; and then the rough country road, leading north between the great flat fields of corn and wheat to where it became a slough in winter, and tall grass and even ironweed grew between the ruts in summer—for there it reached the soggy and tangled groves of Ornaby. But on this brisk autumn afternoon, the crystal and enamel of the silent French car went glistening serenely along a level white way of asphalt. The fields, above which the troubled bride and groom had seen rising the clouds of the summer storm, were fields no longer; for here was bungalow-land, acres and acres of bungalows, with brick groceries and drug stores at some of the street corners, and two or three wooden church spires slenderly asserting their right to look down on all the rest. Cross streets gave glimpses of trolley cars on other north-and-south thoroughfares; great brick schoolhouses, unbearably plain, were to be seen, and a few apartment buildings, not made more beautiful by pinchbeck torturing of their façades. “Of course Dan has no responsibility for this particular awfulness,” Harlan explained. “Without rime or reason the town just decided to grow, and luckily for him it’s grown faster out this northern way than it has in any other direction. Some people seem to think he performed an enchantment to make it do it, but it just happened.”