“I will get down now,” said her father, “then you must slip up on to the box-seat, and I will get up on the other side and take Loveday on my lap.”
Priscilla was delighted. She did not say much, but she was in a perfect rapture of joy at being given the box-seat, and allowed to drive on the level, and even downhill. She had never done so much before, and she thought she should never, never forget this happy day. She longed to get down and hug Betsy, and pat her as her father was doing. Instead, she looked up at the darting, thrilling larks, and sniffed in the smell of the charlock. It could not really have been the scent that she loved, but the associations it had, and the thoughts it brought to her; and she felt that she should love it more than ever after this day.
Then Dr. Carlyon got up and took Loveday on his knee, and on they went again. Presently they saw a cart coming towards them, and Priscilla’s heart beat a little faster as she realised that she would have to pass it. She did not say anything, but her cheeks grew very red, and she felt a great desire to take one rein in each hand; it seemed to her that she could pull Betsy in better if she did; but she did not do it; she knew it was not the right way to hold the reins, and she was rather proud of her skill as a driver.
“You know which side of the road to keep, don’t you?” asked her father. “You haven’t forgotten the verse I taught you, have you?”
“No,” said Priscilla. “At least, I remember most of it.
“‘The rules of the road are a paradox quite.’”
Then she paused. “Um-um, I never can remember that second line; but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t tell you anything. I know the others—
“‘If you keep to the left you are sure to be right,
If you keep to the right you are wrong.’”
Priscilla did not know what “paradox” meant, but she thought the last two lines were wonderfully clever, and she always said them to herself when she was driving. The worst of it was, she could not always decide in a moment which was her left hand and which her right. She had to think of the nursery at home, where, if she faced the window, the gas-bracket was on her left hand, and she had to picture herself there, facing the window, and then she knew. But she had not always time to think of those things, particularly when she was driving.