n managed her circle of girls, but it had never occurred
to her to manage her executive father save by indirect and pretty
teasing. Now, in conspiracy with the doctor, she bullied her father. He
saw gray death waiting as alternative, and he was meek. He agreed to
everything. He consented to drive with her across two thousand miles of
plains and mountains to Seattle, to drop in for a call on their
cousins, the Eugene Gilsons.

Back East they had a chauffeur and two cars--the limousine, and the
Gomez-Deperdussin roadster, Claire's beloved. It would, she believed, be
more of a change from everything that might whisper to Mr. Boltwood of
the control of men, not to take a chauffeur. Her father never drove, but
she could, she insisted. His easy agreeing was pathetic. He watched her
with spaniel eyes. They had the Gomez roadster shipped to them from New
York.

On a July morning, they started out of Minneapolis in a mist, and as it
has been hinted, they stopped sixty miles northward, in a rain, also in
much gumbo. Apparently their nearest approach to the Pacific Ocean would
be this oceanically moist edge of a cornfield, between Schoenstrom and
Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.

* * * * *

Claire roused from her damp doze and sighed, "Well, I must get busy and
get the car out of this."

"Don't you think you'd better get somebody to help us?"

"But get who?"

"Whom!"

"No! It's just 'who,' when you're in the mud. No. One of the good things
about an adventure like this is that I must do things for myself. I've
always had people to do things for me. Maids and nice teachers and you,
old darling! I suppose it's made me soft. Soft--I would like a soft
davenport and a novel and a pound of almond-brittle, and get all sick,
and not feel so beastly virile as I do just now. But----"

She turned up the collar of her gray tweed coat, painfully climbed
out--the muscles of her back racking--and examined the state of the rear
wheels. They were buried to the axle; in front of them the mud bulked in
solid, shiny blackness. She took out her jack and chains. It was too
late. There was no room to get the jack under the axle. She remembered
from the narratives of motoring friends that brush in mud gave a firmer
surface for the wheels to climb upon.

She also remembered how jolly and agreeably heroic the accounts of their
mishaps had sounded--a week after they were over.

She waded down the road toward an old wood