walked home with her after we got tired of skating, and after that I
thought of nothing but how to get my own farm and have a home of my own."

As the daughter sat in the motor listening to the shrill voice of the
father, who now talked only of the making of machines and money, that other
man talking softly in the moonlight as the horse jogged slowly along
the dark road seemed very far away. All such men seemed very far away.
"Everything worth while is very far away," she thought bitterly. "The
machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the
old sweet things."

The motor flew along the roads and Tom thought of his old longing to own
and drive fast racing horses. "I used to be half crazy to own fast horses,"
he shouted to his son-in-law. "I didn't do it, because owning fast horses
meant a waste of money, but it was in my mind all the time. I wanted to go
fast: faster than any one else." In a kind of ecstasy he gave the motor
more gas and shot the speed up to fifty miles an hour. The hot, summer air,
fanned into a violent wind, whistled past his head. "Where would the damned
race horses be now," he called, "where would your Maud S. or your J.I.C.
be, trying to catch up with me in this car?"

Yellow wheat fields and fields of young corn, tall now and in the light
breeze that was blowing whispering in the moonlight, flashed past, looking
like squares on a checker board made for the amusement of the child of some
giant. The car ran through miles of the low farming country, through the
main streets of towns, where the people ran out of the stores to stand
on the sidewalks and look at the new wonder, through sleeping bits of
woodlands--remnants of the great forests in which Tom had worked as a
boy--and across wooden bridges over small streams, beside which grew
tangled masses of elderberries, now yellow and fragrant with blossoms.