The Princess Passes | Page 5

have dispositions," I reflected aloud.
"Mules have. I've met them in America. But if you think my idea a
bright one, reward it by going with Jack and me as far as Lucerne.
There you can pick up your mule and your mule-man."
"'A picker-up of unconsidered trifles,'" I quoted dreamily. "Well, if you
and Jack are willing to tool me out on your motor car as far as Lucerne,
I should be an ungrateful brute to refuse. But the difficulty is, I want to
turn a sulky back on my kind at once, while you two----"
"We're starting on the first," said Jack.
"What! No Cowes?"

"We wouldn't give a day on the car for a cycle of Cowes."
And so the plan of my consolation tour was settled, in the supreme
court beyond which there is no appeal. But man can 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.
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CHAPTER II
Mercédès 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 pæans 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,