“It’s to be a good, long fly, you know,” she said. “Not just up and down like those twenty-five-dollars-a-ride things we had here last year. I want to go miles and miles.... Let’s go right across the lake to the Flats and then swing around and come home over Mount Clemens. Can we do that?”
“I have made that circle.”
“What do I do?”
“Sit still and hang on. There’s no promenade-deck to this ship—no orchestra and no dancing.”
“Are you a dancing-man?”
“Far from it. The thé dansant is too dangerous for me. I don’t speak the language.”
“I love to dance,” she said. “I don’t know that the language is more difficult than the one you speak while we dance on the floor above. ‘Waiter, another round of cocktails.’”
Potter climbed up and settled himself in his seat. “You’re not going to quarrel because I don’t like dancing?” he asked.
“I’d forgive you ’most anything this morning. Let’s start. I’m crazy to know how it feels.”
The engine started with a tremendous throbbing roar and the hydro-aeroplane was trundled out on its rails and down the incline to the smooth waters of Lake St. Clair. For an interval it scudded along, neither floating nor flying, like a wild duck frightened and beginning its flight; then the water dropped away, and they were mounting, mounting into the clear, cold spring air.