t, as we swooped over mountain tops, our
eyes plunging down the deep gorges, and dropping with fearful joy over
precipices, for the effect would have been more solemn, more mysterious.
I could imagine that the fantastically formed rocks which loomed above
us or stood ranged far below would have looked by moonlight like statues
and busts of Titans, carved to show poor little humanity such creatures
as a dead world had known. But it is hard for one's imagination to do
the best of which it feels capable when one is dying for lunch.

Even the old "Murder Inn," which my companion obligingly pointed out,
didn't give me the thrill it ought, because time was getting on when we
flew past it, and I would have been capable of eating vulgar bread and
cheese under its wickedly historic roof if I had been invited.

"Do you suppose they know anything about the road and its history?" I
asked the chauffeur, with a slight gesture of my swathed head toward the
solid wall of glass which was our background.

"They? Certainly not, and don't want to know," he answered with an air
of assurance.

"Why do they go about in motors then," I wondered, "if they don't take
interest in things they pass?"

"You must understand as well as I do why this sort of person goes about
in motors," said he. "They go because other people go--because it's the
thing. The 'other people' whom they slavishly imitate may really like
the exhilaration, the ozone, the sight-seeing, or all three; but to this
type the only part that matters is letting it be seen that they've got a
handsome car, and being able to say 'We've just come from the Riviera in
our sixty-horse-power motor-car.' They'd always mention the power."

"Lady Turnour did, even to me," I remembered. "But is Sir Samuel like
that?"

"No, to do him justice, he isn't, poor man. But his wife is his
Juggernaut. I believe he enjoys lying under her wheels, or thinks he
does--which is the same thing."

"Have you been with them long?" I dared to inquire.

"Only a few days. I brought the car down for them from Paris, though not
this way--a shorter one. We're new brooms, the car and I."

"All their brooms seem to be new," I reflected. "I wonder what the
stepson is like?"

"Luckily it doesn't matter much to me," said the chauffeur
indifferently.

"Nor to me. But his name's Herbert."

"His surname?"

"I don't know. There's a Herbert lurking somewhere. It always suggests
to me oily hair parted in the middl