m ere he reaches his destination?"--_The
Spectator_.

That Locker should have come in at the moment when I was trying on my
new automobile get-up was more than a pin-prick to my already ruffled
sensibilities--it was a knife-thrust.

"What on earth are you laughing at, man?" I demanded, whipping off the
goggles that made me look like a senile owl, and facing him angrily,
as he had a sudden need to cover his mouth with a decorous palm.

"I beg pardon, me lord," he said. "It was coming on you sudden in them
things. I never thought to see you, me lord, in hotomobeel
clothes--you who always was so down on the 'orrid machines."

"Well, help me out of them," I answered, feeling the justice of
Locker's implied rebuke. I twisted my wrists free of the elastic
wind-cuffs, and shed the unpleasantly heavy coat that Winston had
insisted I should buy.

"And you such a friend of the 'orse too, me lord," added Locker, aware
that he had me at a disadvantage.

I winced, and felt the need of self-justification. "You're right," I
said. "I never thought I should come to it. But all men fall sooner or
later, and I have held out longer than most. Don't be afraid, though,
that I am going to have a machine of my own: I haven't quite sunk to
that; if everybody else I know has. I'm only going across France on
Mr. Winston's car. He has a new one--the latest make. He tells me that
when he 'lets her out' she does seventy an hour."

"Wot--miles, me lord?" Locker almost dropped the coat of which he had
disencumbered me.

"Kilometres. It's the speed of a good quick train."

It was strange; but until the night of that hateful dinner at the
Carlton, I had never been in a motor car. Half my friends had them, or
meant to have them; but in a kind of lofty obstinacy I had refused to
be a "tooled down" to Brighton or elsewhere. Fancying myself
considerably as a whip, and being an enthusiastic lover of horses, I
had taken up an attitude of hostility to their mechanical rivals, and
chuckled with malice whenever I saw in the papers that any
acquaintance had been hauled up for going beyond the "legal limit."

But on the night of the Carlton dinner, when Molly Winston whirled me
from Pall Mall to Park Lane, that part of me which was not frozen by
the grocer (the part the psychologists call the "unconscious secondary
self") told me that I was having another startling experience apart
from being jilted.

Winston is my oldest friend, and when his