Alice in his arms, not Fidelia, when he had declared his original defiance of Eternity and spoken his denial of his father's God by the graveyard. For Alice, not for Fidelia, had he borrowed the ten thousand dollars. He was following, in business at least, the plan which Alice and he had made together and it was succeeding as they together had hoped.
For Snelgrove-Herrick were prospering. The mahogany furnished office in which David awaited his father, was his own. Upon his desk, between his telephone and his bronze clock, were five little ivory-topped buttons. Press button one and his stenographer appeared; button two brought instant response from the manager of the used car department; button three rang the foreman of the service shop; buttons four and five had no functions yet but they would be assigned to the task of summoning others from additional office space soon to be required by Snelgrove-Herrick.
The painted announcement over the entrance door, proclaiming that Snelgrove-Herrick had the biggest increase in sales in the price-class of the Hamilton car, was literally true. Three times in three years the agency had doubled its business.
The sales amply justified the wide front of plate-glass window display facing the boulevard and necessitated the service shop and the used car department. Whether or not they warranted the present scale of Snelgrove's entertainings and his largess to his down-and-out friends, might be a matter of doubt; but David never needed to overdraw at the office to meet, on Monday morning, the weekly hotel account for Fidelia
