The driver in our brains is an intolerable fellow in sudden crisis. He loses his head; distracted he pulls the levers, and, behold, in a moment the thing is irrevocably done; we are a coward legging it down the street, a murderer with bloody hand, a liar with false words suddenly pumped.
A moment later the driver is calm and aghast at the ruin he has contrived. Why, before God, did he pull the leg lever?—the arm lever?—the tongue lever? In an instant's action he has accomplished calamity; where sunshine laughed now darkness heaps; where the prospect smiled disaster now comes rolling up in thunder.
These are your crises. Again, as now with George, the driver becomes temporarily idiot—stands us oafishly silent, or perhaps jerks out some stupid words; remembers when too late the quip that would have fetched the laugh, the thrust that would have sped the wound. He is an intolerable fellow.
“Oh, what must you think of me?”
That pause followed while the driver in George's brain stood gapingly inactive; and then came laughter to him like a draught of champagne. For the girl put up her firm, round chin and laughed with a clear pipe of glee—a laugh to call a laugh as surely as a lark's note will set a hedge in song; and it called the laugh in George.
He said: “I am thinking the nicest things of you. But have you dropped from the skies?”
“From a cab,” she protested.
She turned to the road; back to George in dismay, for the catapult, its bullet shot, had bolted up the street—was gone from view.
“Oh!—I was in a cab?” she implored.
George said: “It looked like a cab. But a fairy-car, I think.”