"You're a funny girl," George said gently. "But your voice sounds pretty
nice when you think and talk along together like that!"

The horse shook himself all over, and the impatient sleighbells made his
wish audible. Accordingly, George tightened the reins, and the cutter
was off again at a three-minute trot, no despicable rate of speed. It
was not long before they were again passing Lucy's Beautiful House,
and here George thought fit to put an appendix to his remark. "You're a
funny girl, and you know a lot--but I don't believe you know much about
architecture!"

Coming toward them, black against the snowy road, was a strange
silhouette. It approached moderately and without visible means of
progression, so the matter seemed from a distance; but as the cutter
shortened the distance, the silhouette was revealed to be Mr. Morgan's
horseless carriage, conveying four people atop: Mr. Morgan with George's
mother beside him, and, in the rear seat, Miss Fanny Minafer and the
Honorable George Amberson. All four seemed to be in the liveliest
humour, like high-spirited people upon a new adventure; and Isabel waved
her handkerchief dashingly as the cutter flashed by them.

"For the Lord's sake!" George gasped.

"Your mother's a dear," said Lucy. "And she does wear the most
bewitching things! She looked like a Russian princess, though I doubt if
they're that handsome."

George said nothing; he drove on till they had crossed Amberson Addition
and reached the stone pillars at the head of National Avenue. There he
turned.

"Let's go back and take another look at that old sewing-machine," he
said. "It certainly is the weirdest, craziest--"

He left the sentence unfinished, and presently they were again in sight
of the old sewing-machine. George shouted mockingly.

Alas! three figures stood in the road, and a pair of legs, with the toes
turned up, indicated that a fourth figure lay upon its back in the snow,
beneath a horseless carriage that had decided to need a horse.

George became vociferous with laughter, and coming up at his trotter's
best gait, snow spraying from runners and every hoof, swerved to the
side of the road and shot by, shouting, "Git a hoss! Git a hoss! Git a
hoss!"

Three hundred yards away he turned and came back, racing; leaning out
as he passed, to wave jeeringly at the group about the disabled machine:
"Git a hoss! Git a hoss! Git a--"

The trotter had broken into a gallop, and Lucy cried a warning: