Kate laughed at him outright; his linen suit was red over with fine dust, dust lay half an inch deep on the brim of his Panama, his very eyebrows were red with the molecules of the mountain roads.
“Well, my girl,” he said, “it was worth it—well worth it. Blessed be motor-cars [p136] henceforth and forever, though hitherto I’ve never had a good word to throw at one. Great Scott! to think of it; but for the chance of one chap laying another fifty to a hundred that his car could do the journey down in ten minutes under the other chap’s, those girls would be jabbering in my ears yet.”
“But I thought they were such wonderful girls,” said Kate amusedly; “‘ducky little girls’, you called them, and ‘little pets’.”
“That’s all very well,” said Hugh; “little pets are very nice in their place, and no one appreciates them better than faithfully yours, for an hour or so. But when you get ’em for breakfast and lunch and dinner. And they even insist upon trifling with the holies of your smoking times, trying to light up cigarettes themselves, and jabbering all the time, why then you seize on a civil offer to risk your neck in a racing car as a drowning man would catch at a torpedo if he found it floating handy.”
“You seem to have returned heart-whole, at all events,” said Kate; “and I’ve had my suspicions of you.”
“No,” said Hugh, fanning himself composedly with a newspaper, “my day is not yet, though as I’ve told you before I’m like the fellow in the comic opera, there is that within me that tells me that when my time does come the convulsion will be tremendous! [p137] When I love, it will be with the accumulated fervour of sixty-six years! But I have an ideal—a semi-transparent Being filled with an inorganic fruit jelly—and I have never yet seen the woman who approaches within reasonable distance of it. All—all opaque—opaque—opaque.”
Kate laughed. “Then I’m afraid you don’t feel much better for the change,” she said.
They had both hoped that a week’s “junketing” with lively companions might bring back the pen’s good hour.
“Better!” he groaned, “why the day you let that Bibby woman loose on me I was a flowing river compared to my mood to-day.”
At that a recollection evidently came over Kate, some memory that the unexpected arrival had driven away, for she froze visibly.