It was a fairy night, and the thing was a fairy story.
The sun had merely gone behind a colored window. The whole vault
of the heaven was white with stars. The road was like a ribbon
winding through the hills. In little whispers, in the dark
places, Marion told me it. We sat together in the tonneau of the
motor. It was past midnight, of a heavenly September. We were
coming in from a stately dinner at the Fanshaws'.
A fairy story is a nice, comfortable human affair. It's about a
hero, and a thing no man could do, and a princess and a dragon.
It tells how the hero found the task that was too big for other
men, how he accomplished it, circumvented the dragon and won the
princess.
The Arabian formula fitted snugly to the facts.
The great Dominion railroad, extending from Montreal into New
York, was having a run of terrible luck; one frightful wreck
followed another. Nobody could get the thing straightened out.
Old Crewe, the railroad commissioner of New York, was relentless
in pressing hard conditions on the road. Then out of the West,
had come young Clinton Howard, big, tawny, virile, like the race
of heroes.
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