Jimmy looked at the derelict Pallas Athene. She was a long, low car, and her body sloped back in lines rather like the rake of the masts of a pirate schooner in a novel. Her delicate pale blue paint still shone, though covered with the dust of the long journey. Her aluminium bonnet glistened in the rays of the setting sun. Her great balloon tyres lay like coiled monsters under her wide black wings. He looked at Hinton's Ford, squat, dumpy, perched absurdly above her little wheels. He noted the battered mud guards, the chipped paint, the tattered hood strapped into an untidy bundle at the back. A pang of acute humiliation gripped him hard.
"Can you do it?" he asked with a sigh.
"On low gear," said Hinton. "There is no doubt that we can do it on low gear. Your lordship has not perhaps had much experience of Fords."
"None," said Jimmy bitterly.
"Then perhaps your lordship will excuse my saying that a Ford will do anything in low gear."
"If so," said Jimmy, with a burst of real magnanimity, "a Ford is a damned sight better car than a Pallas Athene eight cylinder sports model. It won't do anything on any gear."
A really good servant, accustomed to the best houses, is never found wanting, or unable to meet any demand made on him. Asked suddenly in the middle of the afternoon for tripe and onions he displays no astonishment; but in a short time brings tripe and onions into the drawing-room, in a nice dish on a silver salver. Told, at luncheon, that a complete outfit for water polo is required immediately afterwards for a party of eight, he produces, without fuss or protest, bathing suits, balloons and everything else required. James Hinton had been a thoroughly good servant, one of the very best in England, a country which produces the best servants in the world.
From the locker under the back seat of his car he took a long and reliable rope. It was as if he had fully expected to come upon a derelict Pallas Athene when he left home in the afternoon.
The two girls were packed into the back seat of the Ford with many polite apologies. James Hinton took his seat, rigidly upright in front. Jimmy, crushed with shame, crouched over the steering wheel of the Pallas Athene.
The drive began with a gallant effort of Hinton's to be better than his word. He tried the Ford on her top gear. She clanged, snorted, missed fire on one plug after another, made spasmodic jumps and finally stopped, her engine stalled. James Hinton got out, worked hard at the handle for a while and started again. This time he made no attempt to get out of low gear. The progress was slow. On the slightest incline it dropped to about four miles an hour. On a serious hill it became a crawl. Steam rose from the Ford's radiator like smoke from the funnel of a locomotive. The water inside could be heard boiling furiously. Oily smoke rose occasionally between the floor boards at Hinton's feet. The noise was terrific. The heat, even in the back part of the car where the two girls sat, was great. For Hinton it was blasting. But he stuck to his post and the car stuck to its work. She had emerged, a giddy young thing from the works in Detroit eleven years before. Time had sobered her, but had not broken that determination to get somewhere, somehow, which is the characteristic of all Fords of all ages.