“Are you troubled about anything?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“I thought you looked——”
“Oh, no,” he said. “It’s nothing. Perhaps I am a little bothered,” he admitted. “But it’s only about business.”
“Not about the ‘Ornaby Four?’ ” she said, surprised. “I thought it was established as a tremendous success.”
“Oh, it is,” he assured her promptly. “It is. It’s an extraordinary little car and nothing can stop it—except temporarily. It’s bound to climb over any little temporary difficulties. We may have made mistakes, but they won’t amount to anything in the long run.”
“You say you have made mistakes?”
“Not until this year, and even then nothing we can’t remedy. You see Dan’s a great fellow for believing in almost anything that’s new, and an inventor came along last summer with a new type of friction clutch; and we put it in our car. Then I’m afraid we built a fairly enormous number of ‘Fours’ during the winter, but you see we were justified in that, because we knew there’d be a demand for them.”
“And there wasn’t?”
“Oh, yes; there was. But——” he paused; then went on: “Well, the people haven’t seemed to like the new clutch, and that gives us rather a black eye for the time being. Of course we’re going to do our best to straighten things out; we’ll put our old clutch back on all the new cars, but——”