They looked at each other.  The chauffeur got down.  “Of course.”

“Not with me in it, anyhow!”

She sneered.  “Oh!  You boys!  You’ve got no pluck.”

“Perhaps not,” he returned viciously.  “Neither have you got any sense of danger.  Girls like you never have.  I’ve noticed that before.”  Even his mother with horses had no sense of danger.

“You’re very rude,” she replied.  “And it was very rude of you to stop the car.”

“I dare say.  But you shouldn’t have told me you could drive.”

He was now angry.  And she not less so.  He descended, and slammed the door.

“Thanks so much,” he said, raised his hat, and walked away.  She spoke, but he did not catch what she said.  He was saying to himself:  “Pluck indeed!” (He did not like her accusation.) “Pluck indeed!  Of all the damned cheek!...  We might all have been killed—­or worse.  The least she could have done was to apologize.  But no!  Pluck indeed!  Women oughtn’t to be allowed to drive.  It’s too infernally silly for words.”

He glanced backward.  The chauffeur had started the car again, and was getting in by Lois’s side.  Doubtless he was a fatalist by profession.  She drove off.

“Yes!” thought George.  “And you’d drive home yourself now even if you knew for certain you’d have an accident.  You’re just that stupid kind.”

The car looked superb as it drew away, and she reclined in the driver’s seat with a superb effrontery.  George was envious; he was pierced by envy.  He hated that other people, and especially girls, should command luxuries which he could not possess.  He hated that violently.  “You wait!” he said to himself.  “You wait!  I’ll have as good a car as that, and a finer girl than you in it.  And she won’t want to drive either.  You wait.”  He was more excited than he knew by the episode.

CHAPTER V

THE TEA

I

“Tea is ready, Mr. Cannon,” said Mr. Haim in his most courteous style, coming softly into George’s room.  And George looked up at the old man’s wrinkled face, and down at his crimson slippers, with the benevolent air of a bookworm permitting himself to be drawn away from an ideal world into the actual.  Glasses on the end of George’s nose would have set off the tableau, but George had outgrown the spectacles which had disfigured his boyhood.  As a fact, since his return that afternoon from Mrs. John’s, he had, to the detriment of modesty and the fostering of conceit, accomplished some further study for the Final, although most of the time had been spent in dreaming of women and luxury.

“All right,” said he.  “I’ll come.”

“I don’t think that lamp’s been very well trimmed to-day,” said Mr. Haim apologetically, sniffing.

“Does it smell?”

“Well, I do notice a slight odour.”