To have stopped it would have meant some trifling exertion, in starting again; and since Flint never considered such details as a few gallons of gasoline, why should _he_ care?
Lighting a Turkish cigarette, this aristocrat of labor lolled on the padded leather and indifferently--with more of contempt than of interest--regarded a swarm of iron-workers, masons and laborers at work on a new building across the avenue.
Flint, meanwhile, had entered the great mansion, its bronze doors--ravished from the Palazzo Guelfo at Venice--having swung inward to admit him, with noiseless majesty.

Ignoring the doorman, he addressed himself to Edwards, who stood in the spacious, mahogany-panelled hall, washing both hands with imaginary soap.
"Waldron up, yet, Edwards ?" "No, sir.

He--er--I have been unable--" "The devil! Where is he ?" "In his apartments, sir." "Take me up!" "He said, sir," ventured Edwards, in his smoothest voice.

"He said--" "I don't give a damn what he said! Take me up, at once!" "Yes, sir.

Immediately, sir!" And he gestured suavely toward the elevator.
Flint strode down the hall, indifferent to the Kirmanshah rugs, the rare mosaic floor and stained-glass windows, the Parian fountain and the Azeglio tapestries that hung suspended up along the stairway--all old stories to him and as commonplace as rickety odds and ends of furniture might be to any toiler "cribbed, cabin'd and confined" in fetid East Side tenement or squalid room on Hester Street.
The elevator boy bowed before his presence.