The aristocracy of Zenith were dancing at the Kennepoose Canoe Club. They two-stepped on the wide porch, with its pillars of pine trunks, its bobbing Japanese lanterns; and never were there dance frocks with wider sleeves nor hair more sensuously piled on little smiling heads, never an August evening more moon-washed and spacious and proper for respectable romance.
Three guests had come in these new-fangled automobiles, for it was now 1903, the climax of civilization. A fourth automobile was approaching, driven by Samuel Dodsworth.
The scene was a sentimental chromo--crisping lake, lovers in canoes singing "Nelly Was a Lady," all very lugubrious and happy; and Sam Dodsworth enjoyed it. He was a large and formidable young man, with a healthy brown mustache and a chaos of brown hair on a massive head. He was, at twenty-eight, the superintendent of that most noisy and unsentimental institution, the Zenith Locomotive Works, and in Yale (class of 1896) he had played better than average football, but he thought well of the most sentimental sorts of moonlight.
Tonight he was particularly uplifted because he was driving his first car. And it was none of your old-fashioned "gasoline buggies," with the engine under the seat. The engine bulked in front, under a proud hood over two feet long, and the steering column was not straight but rakishly tilted. The car was sporting and rather dangerous, and the lights were powerful affairs fed by acetylene gas. Sam sped on, with a feeling of power, of dominating the universe, at twelve dizzy miles an hour.
At the Canoe Club he was greeted by Tub Pearson, admirable in white kid gloves. Tub--Thomas J. Pearson--round and short and jolly, class-jester and class-dandy at Yale, had been Sam Dodsworth's roommate and chief admirer throughout college, but now Tub had begun to take on an irritable dignity as teller and future president of his father's bank in Zenith.
"It runs!" Tub marveled, as Sam stepped in triumph from the car. "I've got a horse all ready to tow you back!"
Tub had to be witty, whatever happened.
"Certainly it runs! I'll bet I was up to eighteen miles an hour!"
"Yeh! I'll bet that some day automobiles'll run forty!" Tub jeered. "Sure! Why, they'll just about drive the poor old horse right off the highway!"
"They will! And I'm thinking of tying up with this new Revelation Company to manufacture 'em."
"Not seriously, you poor chump?"
"Yes."
"Oh my Lord!" Tub wailed affectionately. "Don't be crazy, Sambo! My dad says automobiles are nothing but a fad. Cost too much to run. In five years, he says, they'll disappear."
Sam's answer was not very logical:
"Who's the young angel on the porch?"