Tish | Page 2

motor over in half a day."
That was how it happened that Bettina Bailey, sitting on Eliza Bailey's
front piazza, decked out in chintz cushions,--the piazza, of course,--saw
a dusty machine come up the drive and stop with a flourish at the steps.
And from it alight, not one chaperon, but three.
After her first gasp Bettina was game. She was a pretty girl in a white
dress and bore no traces in her face of any stern religious proclivities.
"I didn't know--" she said, staring from one to the other of us. "Mother
said--that is--won't you go right upstairs and have some tea and lie
down?" She had hardly taken her eyes from Tish, who had lifted the
engine hood and was poking at the carbureter with a hairpin.
"No, thanks," said Tish briskly. "I'll just go around to the garage and oil
up while I'm dirty. I've got a short circuit somewhere. Aggie, you and
Lizzie get the trunk off."
Bettina stood by while we unbuckled and lifted down our traveling
trunk. She did not speak a word, beyond asking if we wouldn't wait
until the gardener came. On Tish's saying she had no time to wait,
because she wanted to put kerosene in the cylinders before the engine
cooled, Bettina lapsed into silence and stood by watching us.
Bettina took us upstairs. She had put Drummond's "Natural Law in the
Spiritual World" on my table and a couch was ready with pillows and a
knitted slumber robe. Very gently she helped us out of our veils and
dusters and closed the windows for fear of drafts.
"Dear mother is so reckless of drafts," she remarked. "Are you sure you
won't have tea?"
"We had some blackberry cordial with us," Aggie said, "and we all had
a little on the way. We had to change a tire and it made us thirsty."
"Change a tire!"

Aggie had taken off her bonnet and was pinning on the small lace cap
she wears, away from home, to hide where her hair is growing thin. In
her cap Aggie is a sweet-faced woman of almost fifty, rather ethereal.
She pinned on her cap and pulled her crimps down over her forehead.
"Yes," she observed. "A bridge went down with us and one of the nails
spoiled a new tire. I told Miss Carberry the bridge was unsafe, but she
thought, by taking it very fast--"
Bettina went over to Aggie and clutched her arm. "Do you mean to
say," she quavered, "that you three women went through a bridge--"
"It was a small bridge," I put in, to relieve her mind; "and only a foot or
two of water below. If only the man had not been so disagreeable--"
"Oh," she said, relieved, "you had a man with you!"
"We never take a man with us," Aggie said with dignity. "This one was
fishing under the bridge and he was most ungentlemanly. Quite refused
to help, and tried to get the license number so he could sue us."
"Sue you!"
"He claimed his arm was broken, but I distinctly saw him move it."
Aggie, having adjusted her cap, was looking at it in the mirror. "But
dear Tish thinks of everything. She had taken off the license plates."
Bettina had gone really pale. She seemed at a loss, and impatient at
herself for being so. "You--you won't have tea?" she asked.
"No, thank you."
"Would you--perhaps you would prefer whiskey and soda."
Aggie turned on her a reproachful eye. "My dear girl," she said, "with
the exception of a little home-made wine used medicinally we drink
nothing. I am the secretary of the Woman's Prohibition Party."
Bettina left us shortly after that to arrange for putting up Letitia and

Aggie. She gave them her mother's room, and whatever impulse she
may have had to put the Presbyterian Psalter by the bed, she restrained
it. By midnight Drummond's "Natural Law" had disappeared from my
table and a novel had taken its place. But Bettina had not lost her air of
bewilderment.
That first evening was very quiet. A young man in white flannels called,
and he and Letitia spent a delightful evening on the porch talking
spark-plugs and carbureters. Bettina sat in a corner and looked at the
moon. Spoken to, she replied in monosyllables in a carefully sweet tone.
The young man's name was Jasper McCutcheon.
It developed that Jasper owned an old racing-car which he kept in the
Bailey garage, and he and Tish went out to look it over. They very
politely asked us all to go along, but Bettina refusing, Aggie and I sat
with her and looked at the moon.
Aggie in her capacity as chaperon, or as one of an association of
chaperons, used the opportunity to examine