It was really a beautiful afternoon—too beautiful to spend playing bridge in a stuffy room. It might be more sensible, she thought, to break up the party, kidnap Bobby and drive him over to sit on the edge of the water and watch the moon rise; only she rather feared the moon was over. Of course she was dining at the Leonard Piers' that evening, but it was a party eminently chuckable—that is to say, she was going to please them rather than herself. Anyhow, she would have Eleanor move the bridge table out on the terrace. Eleanor was so stupid about preferring to play indoors.
A minute figure, smaller than a man's hand, flashed into the little mirror at her left. Was it—no—yes? A bicycle policeman! Well, she would give him a little race for his stupidity in not recognizing her. She loved speed—it made her a little drunk. The needle swung to forty-five—to fifty, and hung there. She passed a governess cart full of children with a sound like "whist" as the wind rushed by. Now there was a straight road, and clear.
The miniature figure kept growing and growing until it seemed to fill the whole circle of the mirror. The sound of the motorcycle drowned the sound of her own car. A voice shouted "Stop!" almost in her ear. Turning her head slightly to the left, she saw a khaki figure was abreast of her. She slowed the car down and stopped it. A sunburned young face flushed with anger glared at her.
"Here, what do you think this is? A race track?"
Lydia did not answer, staring straight ahead of her. She was thinking that it was a foolish waste of taxpayers' money to keep changing the policemen. Just as you reached a satisfactory arrangement with one of them you found yourself confronted by another. She wasn't in the least alarmed, though he was scolding her roughly—scolding, to be candid, very much as her own father had done. She did not object to his words, but she hated the power of the law behind them—hated the idea that she herself was not the final judge of the rate at which she should drive.
Now he was getting his summons ready. Glancing idly into her mirror, she saw far away, like a little moving picture, the governess cart come into view. She intended to settle the matter before those giggling, goggle-eyed children came abreast. She was a person in whom action followed easily and instantly from the decision to act. Most people, after making a decision, hesitate like a stream above a waterfall, and then plunging too quickly, end in foam and whirlpools. But Lydia's will, for good or evil, flowed with a steady current.
She looked down at the seat beside her for her mesh bag, opened it and found that Evans, who was a good deal of a goose, had forgotten to put her purse in it, although she knew bridge was to be played. Lydia looked up and saw that the officer of the law had followed her gesture with his eyes. She slipped Bobby's bracelet off her arm, and holding her hand well over the edge of the car dropped it on the road. She heard it tinkle on the hard surface.
"You dropped something," he said.
"No."
He swung a gaitered leg from the motorcycle and picked up the bracelet.