She started as if a mouse had sprung at her—and Mamma is dreadfully afraid of little innocent mice. Then she began to explain and apologize as if she had been thirteen, and I—well, I'll say twenty-nine.
I foresee that I am going to have trouble with Mamma.
PART III
TOLD BY THE COUNTESS
XV
A CHAPTER OF PITFALLS
A woman finds out a great many things about herself when she is automobiling. Or is it automobiling that makes new qualities grow? I'm not sure; but then I'm so different in many ways from what I used to be that I hardly know myself any more.
Beechy would tell me that it's all owing to Madame Rose-Blanche of Chicago; but it isn't really. She changed me on the outside; she couldn't change my disposition—except that one is happier when one's pretty than when one's a "trump," as the English ladies say.
But I used to hate being out-of-doors; it seemed such a waste of time. And when poor Mr. Kidder was alive, I often thought that if I could be free to do exactly as I liked for a month, I'd spend it lying on a sofa among a pile of cushions, with a big box of candy, and dozens of new English society novels. Yet now that I am free to do as I like, not for one month, but for all the time, I go gadding around the world at twenty or thirty miles an hour (they feel like twice as many) in an automobile.