"'My dear little girl,' he returned, 'get that out of your head right here. I hope your car will prove everything you want it to be, and the same with your Englishman, and I'm only too grateful that it wasn't a steam yacht you had set your heart on, or a palace on the Hudson.'
"There isn't much more to be said about this part of the afair. Papa paid me four-fifty for Gee-whizz, and I handed the check to Mr. Collenquest, and Mr. Collenquest went away, and then the market began to turn bullish (isn't that the word?) and Great Western went up with a whoop, and it got whoopier and whoppier; and whenever anybody was certain it had reached the top-notch it would take another kick skyward, and it went on jumping and jumping till finally there came a letter from Mr. Collenquest with a check for three thousand five hundred dollars, saying I must have forgotten about buying Gee-whizz back again, and that he had taken the liberty of exceeding my instructions about selling till my shares had touched that figure. Then one morning, as we were at breakfast, a great big splendid Manton car—my car—came whisking up the drive and stopped in front of the house, and the expert—they had thrown him in for a week for nothing—him and an odometer and an ammeter, and a new kind of French spark-plug they wanted me to try—and a gasoline tester —the Mantons are such nice people to deal with in all those little ways—and the expert sent in word: would Miss Hardy come out and see her new car? And, of course, Miss Hardy, went out, and Mr. Hardy went out, and my, aunt went out, and the five guests that were staying with us went out, and the servants went out—and you never saw such a mix-up in all your life, nor such excitement and hurrah-boys generally. For papa was ordering it off the place, and I was explaining about Great Western Preferred, and my aunt was trying to make us listen about a friend who had been burned to death with a gasoline stove, and the guests were taking my part and fighting for the first ride, and the expert was showing off the double vertical cylinders, and explaining splash lubrication to the butler, whom he must have mistaken for papa, and—
"When it had settled down a bit and the battle-smoke drifted away and showed who had won—which was me, naturally—and I had promised aunt to be, oh, so careful, and papa that I'd cross my heart never to go into stocks again, and rides, of course, to the guests, and everything to everybody—then they all went back to breakfast while I had mine brought out on the veranda—mine and the expert's—and I guess I talked four speeds ahead while he ate his on the low gear—for he had come ninety miles and wasn't much of a talker at any time—and I just sat there and gloated over my Manton.
"We had a perfectly delirious week together—the expert and I —for the Manton turned out perfectly splendid and everything they said it was, except for the rear tires blowing up three times, and a short circuit in the coil owing to a faulty condenser; and though it was all I could do to hold it down on the low speeds, you ought to have seen me on the forty-mile clip—till they said I'd have to go to prison for the next offense without the option of a fine. The expert was one of the nicest men you ever saw, and we used to take off cylinder heads, and adjust cams, and spend hours knocking everything to pieces and putting them together again so that I might be prepared for getting on without him. He said he hated to think of that time, and what do you suppose he did? I was lying under the machine at the time, studying the differential, while he was jacking up an axle. Proposed, positively. I dropped a nut and a cotter pin out of my mouth, I was so astonished. We talked it over for about five minutes through one of the artillery, wheels, and I must say he took it beautifully. I wanted to be nice to him, because he had been so patient in explaining things, and never got tired of being asked the same question fifty times. He wiped his eyes with some cotton waste and told me that even if years were to pass and oceans and continents divide us, I had only to say 'come' and he'd come—that is, if I ever got into real trouble with the Manton.
"When it came to saying good-by to him I let him take my cap as a keepsake and accepted a dynamo igniter that he guaranteed not to burn out the wires (though that's exactly what it did a week afterward) and it was all too sad for anything. The governor, you know, that was attached to the igniter, got stuck somehow, and of course the current just sizzled up the plug. Then, when I had been running the machine for about a week and doing splendidly with it, Captain Cartwright turned up from Washington. I suppose I wasn't so pleased as I ought to have been to see him, for though we were engaged and all that, there were wheels within wheels and—you know how silly girls are and what fool things they do, and Gerard Malcolm and the captain, to make matters worse, talked a whole streak about good form, and how in England they always walked their automobites, and how hateful anything like speeding (and going to jail) was to a real English lady, and 'Oh, my dear, would the Queen do it?' Can't you hear him? It goaded me into saying awful things back, and when I took him out for his first spin, as grumpy as only an Englishman can be after you've insulted him from his hat to his boots, I just opened the throttle, threw in the high clutch, and let her go. There were some things I liked about the captain, and the best was that he didn't scare easy. He just folded his arms and never wiggled an eyelash while I took some of the grades like the Empire State Express.
"I knew he was boiling inside, in spite of his calm, British, new-washed look, for I hadn't let him kiss me or anything, and nobody, however brave he is, welcomes the idea of being squashed under a ton of old iron. You see I was in a perfectly vicious humor, thinking what an awful mistake I had made, and what a little fool I had been, and how if it had only been Gerard Malcolm—and while my hands were clenched on the steering-wheel I could see the mark of his horrid ring' sticking through my gauntlets, and I wouldn't have cared two straws if I had blown up a tire just then, and driven head-foremost through a stone wall.
"I had given him about eighteen miles of this sort of thing when the right-hand cylinder began to miss a little. Then, after a while, the left started to skip, too. I stopped under a tree to look for the trouble and pulled up the bonnet. The spark-plugs were badly carbonized, and when I had seen to them and had put the captain on the crank, we could only get explosions at intervals. There was good compression; everything was lubricating nicely; no heating or sticking anywhere—but the engine had lain down on us. The captain was so angry he wouldn't speak a word to me, and mumbled red-hot things to himself under his breath. Guess how I felt. But he was too much of a gentleman not to crank—and so he cranked and cranked and still nothing happened. I chased a whole row of things one after another—battery, buzzer, oil or gasoline in the cylinders, defective insulation, commutator, water in the carburettor, choked feed-pipe,—and all it did was to cough in a dreary, tow-me-home-to-mother sort of way,
"If the captain had known anything about engines and could have made it start, I expect I would have married him and lived happy ever afterward. It was just his Heaven-sent chance to win out and show he was the right man for the place. But he didn't know enough to run a phonograph and began to talk about getting towed home, and how if he ever bought a machine it would be electric. If I had been out of patience with him before, imagine what I felt then! He said he knew all the time I was driving too fast and hurting something, and thought he had proved it by the cylinders being hot—as though they aren't always hot. It was awful how stupid he was and helpless and disagreeable. He couldn't even crank properly and the engine back-fired on him and hurt his hand. Finally I got so desperate that I sat down and cried, while he nursed his hand and said we ought to desert the machine and go home, and that papa would be anxious if we didn't turn up to lunch. I knew all the time he was talking about his lunch. You don't know what an Englishman is if he isn't fed regularly, and it was now after one and we were eighteen miles from High Court.
"But I wasn't the girl to give up the ship. As long as there weren't any fractures or things stuck together I knew the expert could have made it go—and if the expert, why not I? If the captain hadn't flurried me with all the silly things he said, I believe I would have ferreted out the trouble all right. But I was so cross and tired and disgusted that my brain was stalled as well as the Manton, and so I gave up for a little while and wouldn't even answer the captain when he spoke to me.
"Oh, yes, we were pigs, both of us, he in his way and I in mine; and the sun went down and down, and it didn't make me feel any better to think that I was smudged all over with grease, and that my hands and nails were something awful—while if ever there was a galley-slave at the oar, it was the Honorable John Vincent Cartwright cranking.