"What speed is it?" she said.
It might have been fancy, but I thought that Jevons's face underwent a change. I certainly saw Kendal the chauffeur looking at it.
"Speed?" he said. "Speed? Well—you can speed her up to sixty miles an hour if you want to." (He seemed to say, "If she ever is speeded up," or "You jolly well may want.")
He ran his hand lovingly along the car's white flank as if it were alive and could respond to the caress.
"She's a beauty," he said.
The chauffeur looked at him again.
"You won't want to knock her about like you did the last one, Mr.
Jevons," he said.
And Jimmy's face expressed a sort of horror.
The chauffeur looked at us then, and, if you can wink without any motion of the eyelids, he winked. He saw, and he was trying to indicate to us, the state that Jevons had fallen into.
It was infatuation; it was idolatry; it was the most extraordinary passion I have ever known a man otherwise sane to be possessed by. You would have said that that creature with the black-and-white body and the terrific bowels of machinery had some sinister and magic power over him. He loved it; he worshipped it; he was afraid of it. And when you think of how, as the chauffeur said, he had "served" the other car—