“I say, George,” she remarked, looking now straight in front of her.  ("She’s a bit of a caution,” he reflected happily.) “Have you got anything special on this afternoon?”

“Nothing what you may call deadly special,” he answered.  He wanted to call her ‘Lois,’ but his volition failed at the critical moment.

“Well, then, won’t you come and have tea with Miss Wheeler and me?  There’ll only be just a few people, and you must be introduced to Miss Wheeler.”

“Oh!  I don’t think I’d better.”  He was timid.

“Why not?” She pouted.

“All right, then.  Thanks.  I should like to.”

“By the way, what’s your surname?”

("She is a caution,” he reflected.)

“I wasn’t quite sure,” she said, when he had told her.

He was rather taken aback, but he reassured himself.  No doubt girls of her environment did behave as she behaved.  After all, why not?

They entered Hammersmith.  It was a grand and inspiring sensation to swing through Hammersmith thus aristocratically repudiating the dowdy Sunday crowd that stared in ingenuous curiosity.  And there was a wonderful quality in the spectacle of the great, formidable car being actuated and controlled by the little gloved hands and delicately shod feet of this frail, pampered, wilful girl.

In overtaking a cab that kept nearly to the middle of the road, Lois hesitated in direction, appeared to defy the rule, and then corrected her impulse.

“It’s rather confusing,” she observed, with a laugh.  “You see, in France you keep to the right and overtake things on their left.”

“Yes.  But this is London,” said George dryly.

Half a minute later, just beyond the node of Hammersmith, where bright hats and frocks were set off against the dark-shuttered fronts of shops, Lois at quite a good speed inserted the car between a tramcar and an omnibus, meeting the tram and overtaking the omnibus.  The tram went by like thunder, all its glass and iron rattling and shaking; the noise deafened, and the wind blew hard like a squall.  There appeared to be scarcely an inch of space on either side of the car.  George’s heart stopped.  For one horrible second he expected a tremendous smash.  The car emerged safe.  He saw the omnibus-driver gazing down at them with reproof.  After the roar of the tram died he heard the trotting of the omnibus horses and Lois’s nervous giggle.  She tried, and did not fail, to be jaunty; but she had had a shock, and the proof was that by mere inadvertence she nearly charged the posts of the next street-refuge....  George switched off the current.  She herself had shown him how to do it.  She now saw him do it.  The engine stopped, and Lois, remembering in a flash that her dignity was at stake, raised her hand and drew up fairly neatly at the pavement.

“What’s the matter?” she demanded imperiously.

“Are you going to drive this thing all the way into London, Lois?” he demanded in turn.