“Oh, it isn’t goin’ to keep on like this,” he assured her comfortingly. “The contracts are already signed for a new pavement. Six months from now this’ll all be as smooth as a billiard table.”
“But we have to go over it to-day!”
“That’s why I thought the runabout would be pleasanter for you,” he said. “Our old family carriage is more comfortable in some ways, but it hasn’t got rubber tires. I hardly notice the bumps myself with these tires.”
“I do!”
“Think what a great invention it is, though,” he said cheerfully. “Why, before long I shouldn’t wonder if you’d see almost everything that rolls usin’ rubber tires, and a good many such light traps as this with inflated ones like bicycles. If horseless carriages ever amount to anything, they’ll get to usin’ inflated rubber tires, too, most likely.”
“Oh, dear me!” Lena sighed. “Doesn’t this heat ever relent a little?”
He assured her that it did; that the hot spell would soon be over, and that she wouldn’t mind it when they reached the Addition, which was on higher ground. “It’s always cool out at Ornaby,” he said proudly. “The mean level’s twenty-eight feet higher than it is in this part of the city; and I never saw the day when you couldn’t find a breeze out there.”
“Then hurry and get there! It must be a terribly long way. I don’t see any higher ground ahead of us—nothing but this eternal flatness and flatness and flatness! I don’t see how you people stand it. I should think somebody would build a hill!”
He laughed and told her that Ornaby was almost a hill. “Practically, it is,” he said. “Anyhow it’s a sort of plateau—practically. You see the mean level——”
“Oh, dear!” she sighed; and for a time they jogged on in silence.