Picking it up his face was suffused by a darker tide; this was the
result of stooping and the angry realization that in spite of his
prohibition Louise had been using the landaulet again. She must be made
to understand that he, her father, had an absolute authority over his
family and property. Marriage to Bernard Foster did not relieve her
from obedience to the head of the house. Bernard had a car as well as
himself; yet August Turnbull knew that his son-in-law--at heart a
stingy man--encouraged her to burn the parental gasoline in place of
his own. Turned against the public Bernard's special quality was
admirable; he was indeed more successful, richer, than August had been
at the other's age; but Louise and her husband would have to recognize
his precedence.
They were moving faster now on a broad paved avenue bound with steel
tracks. A central business section was left for a more unpretentious
region--small open fruit and fish stands, dingy lodging places, drab
corner saloons, with, at the intervals of the cross streets, fleet
glimpses of an elevated boardwalk and the luminous space of the sea.
Though the day was ending there was no thinning of the vaporous heat,
and a sodden humanity, shapeless in bathing suits, was still
reluctantly moving away from the beach.
Groups of women with their hair in trailing wet wisps and short uneven
skirts dripping on the pavements, gaunt children in scant haphazard
garb surged across the broad avenue or with shrill admonishments stood
in isolated helpless patches amid the swift and shining procession of
automobiles.
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