Morty behaved properly for quite a while--much longer, in fact, than I could have believed possible. Then he brought out a pencil and began to write things on the beck of an envelope. I never moved an eyelash and didn't seem to understand at all till he handed me what he had written. I promptly tore it up and threw it away. But he found another envelope and did it again, this time holding to it tight and moving it before my eyes. I nearly ditched the car, for I was running with an open throttle and the grade was in our favor. Then he bent over and kissed my cloth sleeve. I pulled up short and gave him his choice of either getting out or comporting himself like a civilized being.

He indicated that he would try to do the latter, though be looked awfully savage and folded his arms, and moved as far away from me as the seat would allow. I didn't care, besides he was safer like that than when he was nice--and so I just looked cross, too, and speeded up.

I laid out about a twenty-five mile spin, cut cutting Deering Avenue midway, and branching off where the Italians are working at the new trolley, toward Menlo, Hatcherly and the road through the woods. We turned at the Trocadero, climbed the long hill, and took the river-drive home. You know how steep it is, the river miles below and nothing but the sheerest wall on the other side. But there is no finer road in Europe, and it's straight enough to see everything ahead, so you are free to coast as fast as you please. I let her out at the top, for knew my breaks had been taken up, and there were cotter pins in every bolt of the steering gear; and, as I said before, there was always plenty of room to pull up in if you happened to meet a team. Well, off we went with a rush that made our ears sing, the little car humming like a top.

When we were more than two-thirds down and going like the wind I saw a nurse-girl near the bottom pushing a baby in a baby carriage and coming uphill, with two lithe tots in red dresses walking on either side of her. They saw us the same moment we saw them and lined up against the side--fiery sensibly, as I thought--and it was all so plain and right that I held on without a thought of danger. When I was about ten yards from them and allowing them an ample four feet to the good--I mean from the steep side, where they stuck in a row like barnaeles--what did the little idiots do but rush across the road like a covey of partridges, while the nurse-girl stayed where she was with the baby! If ever a person's blood ran cold it was mine. There was no time, no room, no anything--and the bubble going at forty miles an hour! It seemed like a choice between their lives or our own. But, thank G.o.d, I was game, and I just screamed out the one word "jump!" to Morty and turned the machine over the edge.

I must have jumped, too, though I have no recollection of it, for when I came to myself my head was lying on Morty's knee and on looking about I saw we were still on the road. The machine? Oh, it was two hundred feet below, smashed to smithereens, and if we both hadn't lit out like lightning--

I wasn't a bit hurt, only bruised and giddy, and Morty was throwing the baby's milk in my face to revive me, while the baby looked on and roared with displeasure at its being wasted. Morty wasn't hurt, either, and if there were ever two people well out of a bad sc.r.a.pe it was he and I. He had been so frightened about me he was crying; and I guess his tears were like the recording angel's, because they seemed to blot out all the old quarrel between us. At least, when we got up and began to limp home it seemed to me I didn't mind anything so long as he was close to me. He was shameless enough to kiss me right before the nurse-girl, who was demanding our names and addresses and our blood--and all I did was to kiss back. I didn't have any fight left, and for once he had everything his own way. Of course, it didn't last long--it wouldn't have been good for him if it had--but even in six minutes I managed to lose the results of six months'

coldness. Yet I was glad it was gone; glad just to be alive; and we'd look at each other and laugh like children. You don't realize what a good old place the world is until you've taken a chance on leaving it and weighed against death itself; all our little jealousies and misunderstandings seemed too trivial to count. It seemed enough that I loved him and that he loved me and that neither of us had broken anything--bones, I mean. It was sad, though, to think the poor little bubble was a goner and that we'd never hear its honest little pant again.

"If we had lived up to the comic papers, Morty," I said, "we would have spiflicated a red child, given a merry toot and disappeared in a cloud of dust!"

"I'm almost sorry we didn't," said Morty, who was dreadfully pale and always hated walking. "We'll know better next time."

"There'll be no next time for that bubble," I said sadly.

"It's sparked its last spark and will never choo-choo again!

"I mean our next car, of course," said Morty (it was awfully sweet to hear him say "our." And it took the sting out of losing the little bubble, especially now that we're going to have another).

"Yesterday Forbes Mason offered me his new four-cylinder Lafayette for twenty-eight hundred dollars," said Morty; "it's only been run five hundred miles, and I told him I'd think about it."

"It's suspiciously cheap," I said. "Sure he hasn't cut the cylinders?"

"Well, you see, he broke his arm cranking. It backfired on him, and his wife is such a little fool that he had to promise to give up automobiling."

"They are splendid cars, with a record of fifty miles on the track, unstripped and out of stock!"

"And you shall have half-interest in it, Virgie!"

"I never could pay fourteen hundred dollars, Morty, and I don't want any more of pa's blanks. It's too exasperating."

"Oh, I meant for nothing!"

"Then it's a present--and there's always a string to your presents."

"Isn't there to everybody's?"

"Besides, it's an air-cooled motor," I said, not wanting to appear too eager. "Don't they always overheat in time and stick the pistons?"

"Not the Lafayette!"

"Don't tempt me," I said. "You know I couldn't take it on any terms."

"Forced feed lubrication and direct drive on the fourth speed," he continued, like a stage villain offering diamonds to the heroine.

"What kind of a string?"

"Oh, Virgie, it was all a lie about Josie Felton."

"I had it straight from Mrs. Gettridge and she's Josie's aunt and she ought to know, I guess."

"Mrs. Gettridge is a social a.s.sa.s.sinator belongs to a regular Mafia of mischief-makers and old cats--you know you used to care once."

"Oh, I did, Morty, I did. It nearly broke my heart, and I just wanted to throw myself away--become a trained nurse or go in for settlement work!"

"Couldn't it ever be as it used to be?"

"I should want all the bushings of phosphor bronze."

"They are that already--and it's patent-lock nutted throughout, and the engine is that new kind that interlocks. I'll draw it for you when I get home . . . and we'll be married at the same time as Harry and Nelly."

"And one of those French bra.s.s gasoline tanks that set flat against the dash-board and hold a two-gallon extra supply."

"You shall have it!"

"But she said she had actually, seen the letter!"

"It was all a lie, every word of it," he broke out. "We'll go straight to her now if you like and have it out, and then you'll see whom to believe! There never was any letter or anything, except that she made up her mind I was to have her niece whether I wanted to or not. I told you that fifty million times in the letters you wouldn't read and sent back unopened. And it wasn't the kind of message I could give anybody else to take to you. I had to think of the girl, of course, and I know she liked me."

"French tires, of course?"

"Every blessed thing just the way you want it. The only thing I can't see my way to change is the chauffeur, a poor devil named Truslow, who's really an awful decent kind of fellow when you get to know him!"

"Oh, dear," I said, "I never dreamed the Great Bubble Syndicate was going to end like this!"

"End?" cried Morty, putting his arm around my waist as though he now had a right to. "It's only the reorganization of a splendid old concern, and for fourteen hundred kisses I am going to let you in on the ground floor!"

COAL OIL JOHNNY

It was eleven o'clock in the forenoon, and on the veranda of Mrs.

Hemingway's house three young girls were gathered in conversation. Below them a garden ran to the water's edge and gave access to a wooden pier projecting some thirty or forty feet beyond. Here, in a mimic harbor formed by a sharp turn of the sh.o.r.e and a line of piles on which the pier was supported, rode the Hemingway fleet at its moorings: a big half-decked catboat, a gasoline launch, an Indian canoe and two trim gigs. Here, too, under the kindly lee of a small boat-house, the Hemingway crew lay stretched in slumber, his head pillowed on an ancient jib, and his still-smoking pipe fallen from his unconscious lips. A Hemingway puppy was stalking some Hemingway tomt.i.ts, in the bland, leisurely, inoffensive manner of one whose intentions were not serious; and the picture was completed by a Hemingway cat, with a blue ribbon round its neck, which was purring to itself in a serenity that a stray page of a Sunday supplement never yet afforded man.

The wide, shady veranda was articulate of summer and girls and gaiety, and of all that pleasant, prosperous American homeliness that we see so much of in life and hear so little about in fiction. Hammocks, rocking-chairs and rugs were scattered about in a comfortable, haphazard fashion; a tea-table here was stacked high with novels and magazines; a card-table there bore a violin, a couple of tennis racquets, a silver-handled crop and a box of papa's second-best cigars. (The really-truly best were under the basketwork sofa.) There was also a sewing-machine, a music-stand, a couple of dogs asleep on the floor, a family Bible full of pressed wild flowers, a twenty-two-bore rifle, and the messy remains of a Latin exercise that the son of the house had recently been engaged upon before being called away to play Indian.

Dolly Hemingway, a handsome, fair-haired, imperious-looking girl, was lolling in a hammock, directing the deliberations of Sattie Felton, aged seventeen, who was sitting on the floor holding a dog's head in her lap, and of Grace Sinclair, aged twenty, who was in possession of a stool and a box of chocolate creams. A very important matter was being discussed, and that was why everybody was talking at once, and how it came about that a young man pa.s.sed unnoticed through the cool darkened rooms of the house and appeared without warning before the little group--a tall, bulky young man, with an air of diffidence on his honest, sunburned face, and a general awkwardness of movement that seemed to betray a certain doubt as to his welcome. He stammered out something like "Good morning," and then stood there, hat in hand, waiting for the ma.s.sacre to begin.

"Mr. Ba.s.sity!" exclaimed Dolly Hemingway, straightening up in the hammock, and staring at him with cold gray eyes. The bulky young man halted, tried to find some rea.s.surance in the no less chilling faces of Sattie Felton and Grace Sinclair, and then said, "How do you do!" in a voice of extreme dejection.

"It is the custom here," said Dolly in cutting accents, "for a gentleman, when he calls upon a lady, to announce himself first at the door--"

"And be told she's out," said Mr. Ba.s.sity, timidly defiant.

"Call next day, and out, too! Call next week and still out!"

"When you make a closer study of the social system," began Miss Hemingway "our social system, which seems in vogue everywhere except the place you came from--you will discover that such little subterfuges save painful interviews."