ld have written in another
strain. Sometimes I pick up a piece in the newspapers about women and
then I laugh to myself, thinking how many mugs there are in the world
and how they were born for the other sex to make game of. Let 'em get
on the driver's seat and take madam round an afternoon or two. There
won't be much talk about gentle shepherdesses after that, I'll
wager--though if a crook or two don't get into the story I'm Dutchman.

Well, you must know that this is about Dolly St. John--a little
American girl, who hired a car from the Empire Company when I was one
of its drivers, and had a pretty little game with us. I used to go for
her every afternoon to some hotel or the other, and always a different
one, she not being domesticated, so to speak, and never caring to
overstay her welcome.

A daintier little body was never fitted upon a chassis. There are some
who like them fair, and some who like them dark--but Dolly St. John was
betwixt and between, neither the one nor the other, but a type that
gets there every time, and turns twenty heads when a policeman stops
you at a crossing.

It's very natural that young women should like to talk to their
drivers; and, if the truth were told, some of them will tell us things
they would never speak of, no, not to their own husbands, if they've
got any. Dolly was one of these, and a more talkative little body
never existed. I knew her history the very first afternoon I took her
round; and by the third, I could have told you that she had met the
Hon. John Sarand, and meant to marry him, even if his old father, Lord
Badington, had to go on the halls in consequence.

I had driven Dolly about three weeks, if I remember rightly, when our
people first began to get uneasy. It was all very well for her to talk
about her uncle, Nathaniel St. John, of New York City, who made a
hundred thousand dollars a day by blowing bubbles through a telephone;
but her bill for seventy-five sixteen and four remained unpaid, and
when Hook-Nosed Moss, our manager, asked her for it, all he got was a
cigarette out of a bon-bon box, and an intimation that if he came on a
similar errand again, she'd write to the papers about it. Had she not
been a born little actress, who could have earned twenty a week on any
stage in London, the man would have closed the deal on the spot, and
left it to the lawyers. But she just tickled him like a carburettor,
and he went home to say that the money was bett