“I can’t let you go out in that, miss,” she said. “You’d ’ave all the boys in the place callin’ after you, and that brings disgrice on me, it being known as I work for you.”
“That’s all right, Minnie,” I said. “I’m not going to wear it in the street.”
So far I had not gone outside my own province, and had moved with comparative ease. My next step had to be more circumspect, for I was about to attack the business man once more.
There are many cars, and at that time they were all the same to me. I read the motoring news in the daily papers assiduously for a week, and then I thought that I would try the Pegasus people. The Pegasus car had just done some remarkable trials; it had one or two novelties in construction; it had not an immense reputation already, but it seemed to have a chance of making one.
So one afternoon I put on gorgeous apparel and walked into the show-room of the Pegasus people looking exactly as if I were about to buy a car. I even felt a little like it too. A tall, handsome man in a frock coat and a powerful little fellow in a dirty overall removed their attention from a car’s duodenum as I approached. The handsome man came forward. The powerful, squat man remained by the car; he still seemed busy with its vermiform appendix, but he was listening all the time.
“I want,” I said, “to learn how to drive the Pegasus car. I want also to learn a good deal about the interior of the car so that I can do adjustments and slight repairs. And I want to learn everything about tyres.”
There was just the flicker of a smile over the handsome man’s face, but in a moment he had stowed it away at the back of his head and was asking me suavely if I wished to buy a car.
“No,” I said boldly. “Not at all. I could not afford it. I have not the money. Buy a car? I’m more likely to sell one. All I want at present is to understand the car thoroughly, and to know how to drive it.”
The handsome man hesitated. The man in the dirty overall lifted up a bit of the car’s femoral artery, looked at it, and then gave his undivided attention to the handsome man and myself.
“I should, of course, be prepared to pay,” I added.