less was Angela surprised at anything it chose to do. The
Model was a model of all the vices. It smoked like a chimney, drank like a
fish, and developed, one after another or all together, every malady to
which motor-metal is heir. The stages of the way, even to the Mission of
San Gabriel, in its sleepy old Mexican village on the fringe of Los
Angeles, were punctuated with disasters. A burst tire was a comma;
carburetor trouble a colon; nervous prostration of the sparking-plug a
period. But Mr. Sealman never lost confidence. He explained everything,
justified himself and the car; told anecdotes of his courage, and let fall
pathetic words concerning an invalid mother dependent on him and his
success.

"I'm a pioneer, I tell you," he said. "You and I are making history this
minute."

Angela would gladly have turned from so lurid an occupation to any other
pursuit; but Mr. Sealman looked as if his health were more fragile than
that of the car. When he clawed obscurely at the crystallized sugar
ornaments under the bright bonnet of the fainting Model, his air looked so
dejected, his eyes so hollow, and his smile so wan that Angela's fury
melted into pity. Passionate resolves to shed him and his blue abomination
died within her as she watched his struggles. His whole future depended,
he said, on the Model. If Mrs. May should throw him over and hire another
car, the news would fly like lightning from garage to garage of Los
Angeles; indeed, from end to end of California. He would be ruined. His
mother, who had been forbidden excitement, would, without doubt, die of
heart failure.

The heart of Angela failed also, again and yet again. She began to see
that Mr. Sealman had cast himself for the part of Old Man of the Sea, in a
travel drama of which she was heroine. She felt alone in the world. "It
will probably end in my having to buy the little blue brute and burn it,"
she thought. "But even then the codfish will probably insist on being my
butler."

These gloomy forebodings shadowed her mind one morning when the Model
broke down about half a mile from fantastic little Venice, the Coney
Island of South California. In a rage she got out and walked, past a
kaleidoscopic pattern of tiny bazaars, shooting-galleries, paper icebergs,
and cardboard mountains. She threaded her way through a good-natured crowd
of tall, tanned young Americans, pretty girls with wonderful erections of
golden hair, dark-faced Mexicans, yellow-faced Japa