I almost wished it were night, as we swooped over mountain tops, our eyes plunging down the deep gorges, and dropping with fearful joy over precipices, for the effect would have been more solemn, more mysterious.  I could imagine that the fantastically formed rocks which loomed above us or stood ranged far below would have looked by moonlight like statues and busts of Titans, carved to show poor little humanity such creatures as a dead world had known.  But it is hard for one’s imagination to do the best of which it feels capable when one is dying for lunch.

Even the old “Murder Inn,” which my companion obligingly pointed out, didn’t give me the thrill it ought, because time was getting on when we flew past it, and I would have been capable of eating vulgar bread and cheese under its wickedly historic roof if I had been invited.

“Do you suppose they know anything about the road and its history?” I asked the chauffeur, with a slight gesture of my swathed head toward the solid wall of glass which was our background.

“They?  Certainly not, and don’t want to know,” he answered with an air of assurance.

“Why do they go about in motors then,” I wondered, “if they don’t take interest in things they pass?”

“You must understand as well as I do why this sort of person goes about in motors,” said he.  “They go because other people go—­because it’s the thing.  The ‘other people’ whom they slavishly imitate may really like the exhilaration, the ozone, the sight-seeing, or all three; but to this type the only part that matters is letting it be seen that they’ve got a handsome car, and being able to say ’We’ve just come from the Riviera in our sixty-horse-power motor-car.’  They’d always mention the power.”

“Lady Turnour did, even to me,” I remembered.  “But is Sir Samuel like that?”

“No, to do him justice, he isn’t, poor man.  But his wife is his Juggernaut.  I believe he enjoys lying under her wheels, or thinks he does—­which is the same thing.”

“Have you been with them long?” I dared to inquire.

“Only a few days.  I brought the car down for them from Paris, though not this way—­a shorter one.  We’re new brooms, the car and I.”

“All their brooms seem to be new,” I reflected.  “I wonder what the stepson is like?”

“Luckily it doesn’t matter much to me,” said the chauffeur indifferently.

“Nor to me.  But his name’s Herbert.”

“His surname?”

“I don’t know.  There’s a Herbert lurking somewhere.  It always suggests to me oily hair parted in the middle and smeared down on each side of a low, narrow forehead.  Could you know a ’Bertie’?”

“I did once, and never want to again.  He was a swine and a snob.  Hope you never came across the combination?”

I forgot to answer, because, having left the mountain world behind, a formidable line of nobly planned arches began striding along beside us, through the sun-bright fields, and I was sure it must be the giant Roman aqueduct of Frejus.