“Never!” I cried.
“It’s perfectly easy,” she went on. “If children can run them, and the idiots they have in garages and on taxicabs——”
“Never,” I said firmly. “It may be easy, but it took you six months, Tish Carberry, and three broken springs and any number of dead chickens and animals, besides the time you went through a bridge, and the night you drove off the end of a dock. It may be easy, but if it is, I’d rather do something hard.”
“I shall sit beside you, Lizzie,” she said, in a patient voice. “I daresay you know which is your right foot and which is your left. If not, I can tell you. I shall say ‘left’ when I want you to push out the clutch, and ‘right’ for the brake. As for gears, I can change them for you with my left hand.”
“I could do it sitting in a chair,” I said, in a despairing voice. “But Tish,” I said, in a last effort, “do you remember when you tried to teach me to ride a bicycle? And that the moment I saw something to avoid I made a mad dash for it?”
“This is different,” Tish said. “It is a car——”
“And that I rode about a quarter of a mile into Lake Penzance, and would likely have ridden straight across if I hadn’t run into a canoe and upset it?”
“You can always stop a car,” said Tish. “Don’t be a coward, Lizzie. All you have to do is to shove hard with your right foot.”
Yet, when I did exactly that, she denied she had ever said it. Fond as I am of Tish, I must admit that she has a way of forgetting things she does not wish to remember.
In the end I consented. It was against my better judgment, and I warned Tish. I have no talent for machinery, but indeed a great fear of it, since the time when as a child I was visiting my grand-aunt’s farm and almost lost a finger in a feed-cutter. In addition to that, Tish’s accident and her secret had both unnerved me. I knew that calamity faced us as I took my place at the wheel.