The Bolted Door Author:George Gibbs Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE LADY IN THE LIMOUSINE "Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, but—why did you kick me downstairs?" He had read the foolish lines s... more »omewhere, and they rang in Garriott's mind all the way down the avenue, in his angry walk to the hotel. When he had come out of Yale and gone back West for the practical work, O'Dowd, in the shops, had been the first to set him down; and later, Jamison, foreman of road engines, whose vocabulary had made his name a by-word the length of the Western Division, had shown him, in appropriate language, the small niche he was to fill in the world—at least that part of the world in which they both sweated and strove in the company's service. That was life—experience. It had given Garriott, in exact terms, the measure of his usefulness. But it was a year now since Jamison had been given a chance to swear, and Garriott knew that the work he had done was good. His promotion and the allowance for experimental work had proved it. So far as the profession was concerned, he had found himself. But he could not remember that ever in his life he had been placed at such a disadvantage as in this brief interview with his snobbish cousin-in-law. Not O'Dowd or even Jamison, rough as they were, had ever so diminished him. It was clear that in the eyes of Miss Judson, he was a creature of another world— of the world of those who worked to create, to build, and to serve the uses of sublimated beings like herself and those of her class. His own struggle to win his way on his own merits had made him intolerant of superficialities, a reflection of which he saw so plainly written in the face of the handsome Natalie. She was handsome. He was compelled to acknowledge that. He admired good looks in women with the same impersonal eye with which he e...« less