The Princess Passes | Page 5

do no more than propose; and woman--even American woman--cannot invariably "dispose" to the extent of remaking the whole world of mules and men according to her whim.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER II
Merc��d��s to the Rescue
"What is more intellectually exhilarating to the mind, and even to the senses, than . . . looking down the vista of some great road . . . and to wonder through what strange places, by what towns and castles, by what rivers and streams, by what mountains and valleys it will take him ere he reaches his destination?"--The Spectator.
That Locker should have come in at the moment when I was trying on my new automobile get-up was more than a pin-prick to my already ruffled sensibilities--it was a knife-thrust.
"What on earth are you laughing at, man?" I demanded, whipping off the goggles that made me look like a senile owl, and facing him angrily, as he had a sudden need to cover his mouth with a decorous palm.
"I beg pardon, me lord," he said. "It was coming on you sudden in them things. I never thought to see you, me lord, in hotomobeel clothes--you who always was so down on the 'orrid machines."
"Well, help me out of them," I answered, feeling the justice of Locker's implied rebuke. I twisted my wrists free of the elastic wind-cuffs, and shed the unpleasantly heavy coat that Winston had insisted I should buy.
"And you such a friend of the 'orse too, me lord," added Locker, aware that he had me at a disadvantage.
I winced, and felt the need of self-justification. "You're right," I said. "I never thought I should come to it. But all men fall sooner or later, and I have held out longer than most. Don't be afraid, though, that I am going to have a machine of my own: I haven't quite sunk to that; if everybody else I know has. I'm only going across France on Mr. Winston's car. He has a new one--the latest make. He tells me that when he 'lets her out' she does seventy an hour."
"Wot--miles, me lord?" Locker almost dropped the coat of which he had disencumbered me.
"Kilometres. It's the speed of a good quick train."
It was strange; but until the night of that hateful dinner at the Carlton, I had never been in a motor car. Half my friends had them, or meant to have them; but in a kind of lofty obstinacy I had refused to be a "tooled down" to Brighton or elsewhere. Fancying myself considerably as a whip, and being an enthusiastic lover of horses, I had taken up an attitude of hostility to their mechanical rivals, and chuckled with malice whenever I saw in the papers that any acquaintance had been hauled up for going beyond the "legal limit."
But on the night of the Carlton dinner, when Molly Winston whirled me from Pall Mall to Park Lane, that part of me which was not frozen by the grocer (the part the psychologists call the "unconscious secondary self") told me that I was having another startling experience apart from being jilted.
Winston is my oldest friend, and when his letters were mere p?ans in praise of automobilism, I looked upon his fad with compassionate indulgence. Then we met in London after his marriage, and between the confidences which we had exchanged, he managed to sandwich in something about motor cars. But I ruthlessly swept aside the interpolation as unworthy of notice. When he suggested a drive in the new car, I called up all my tact to evade the invitation. If the active part of me had not been stunned on the night when Helen threw me over, I believe I should have kept bright the jewel of consistency. But the kindness of Molly in circumstances the opposite of kind, had undone me. Here I was, pledged to get myself up like a figure of Fun, and sit glued for days to the seat of a noisy, jolting, ill-smelling machine which I hated, feeling (and looking), in my goggles and hairy coat, like a circus monkey or a circus dragon.
Nevertheless, I could confess the motor car to my man with comparative calmness. That I should fall was no doubt a disappointment to him. As a conscientious snob and a cherisher of conservative ideals, he could mention it to other valets without a blush. The mules however, towards which the motor was to lead, was a different thing; and while poor Locker excavated me from the motor coat, my mind was busily devising means to keep the horrid secret of the mule hidden from him forever.
There was but one way to do this.
"I suppose, me lord, I'm to travel with the 'eavy luggage, and take rooms at the end of the journey," he suggested.
The crucial moment had come. If a man can