“Oh, dear!” said Honora, “don’t you think we ought to take the train, Mr. Brent?  If I were to miss a dinner at my own house, it would be too terrible!”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he assured her.  “Nothing broken.  It’s only the igniting system that needs adjustment.”

Although this was so much Greek to Honora, she was reassured.  Trixton Brent inspired confidence.  There was another argument with the chauffeur, a little more animated than the first; more greasy plugs taken out and wiped, and a sharper exchange of compliments with the crowd; more grinding, until the chauffeur’s face was steeped in perspiration, and more pistol shots.  They were off again, but lamely, spurting a little at times, and again slowing down to the pace of an ox-cart.  Their progress became a series of illustrations of the fable of the hare and the tortoise.  They passed horses, and the horses shied into the ditch:  then the same horses passed them, usually at the periods chosen by the demon under the hood to fire its pistol shots, and into the ditch went the horses once more, their owners expressing their thoughts in language at once vivid and unrestrained.

It is one of the blessed compensations of life that in times of prosperity we do not remember our miseries.  In these enlightened days, when everybody owns an automobile and calmly travels from Chicago to Boston if he chooses, we have forgotten the dark ages when these machines were possessed by devils:  when it took sometimes as much as three hours to go twenty miles, and often longer than that.  How many of us have had the same experience as Honora!

She was always going to take the train, and didn’t.  Whenever her mind was irrevocably made up, the automobile whirled away on all four cylinders for a half a mile or so, until they were out of reach of the railroad.  There were trolley cars, to be sure, but those took forever to get anywhere.  Four o’clock struck, five and six, when at last the fiend who had conspired with fate, having accomplished his evident purpose of compelling Honora to miss her dinner, finally abandoned them as suddenly and mysteriously as he had come, and the automobile was a lamb once more.  It was half-past six, and the sun had set, before they saw the lights twinkling all yellow on the heights of Fort George.  At that hour the last train they could have taken to reach the dinner-party in time was leaving the New York side of the ferry.

“What will they think?” cried Honora.  “They saw us leave Delmonico’s at two o’clock, and they didn’t know we were going to Westchester.”

It needed no very vivid imagination to summon up the probable remarks of Mrs. Chandos on the affair.  It was all very well to say the motor broke down; but unfortunately Trixton Brent’s reputation was not much better than that of his car.

Trixton Brent, as might have been expected, was inclined to treat the matter as a joke.

“There’s nothing very formal about a Quicksands dinner-party,” he said.  “We’ll have a cosey little dinner in town, and call ’em up on the telephone.”