It couldn’t last.  He was wearing himself out.  Those early excesses exhausted his capacity for pleasure, and when we came to stay with him in the last two weeks of July we found him apathetic about motoring.

But not about motor-cars.  As far as the cars went he had developed into an incurable motor-maniac.  He was never tired of talking about carburetters, and tyres, and petrol, and garages and gear.  He dreamed of these things at night.  Every day he invented some extraordinary contrivance for increasing speed and lessening friction.  He knew all that was to be known about the different kinds of cars; and he would roll their names on his tongue—­Panhard and Fiat and Daimler and Mercedes and Rolls-Royce, as if the sound of them caressed him like music.

And the first car which he had mastered—­it was a comparatively cheap one, but it wouldn’t be fair to say what kind it was, for the poor thing had gone to pieces under his hand in six months; he had served her, his chauffeur said, something cruel—­that first car had been sold for a hundred and fifty pounds, and Viola was mourning for it when we came down in July.

We couldn’t think why she mourned, for he had bought another.  We supposed that the new car had broken down, for we were met at Midhurst station by the local cab proprietor.  But we were very soon to know that nothing had happened to the new car, and that something very serious indeed had happened to Jimmy.

He had gone mad—­you can only call it mad—­over his new car.

As soon as we had tea we were taken to see it where it stood in the coach-house that served as a garage.

It was a magpie car—­the first, Jimmy told me, that had appeared down in that part of the country—­white, with black bonnet and black splashboards, and black leather hood and cushions; so black that its body, in the matchless purity of its whiteness, staggered you.  Anybody, Jevons said, could have an all-white car, and it wouldn’t be noticed any more than a common taxi-cab.  But one magpie in a countless crowd of cars annihilated all the rest.  Lemon colour was good and so was scarlet; but for effect—­for sheer destruction to other automobilists—­there was nothing like a white car with black points.  It was, Jimmy said and Kendal, the chauffeur, said, a perfect car.  From their tone you wondered what you had ever done that you should be allowed to approach and see it where it stood.

Where it stood, I say.  You couldn’t see that car doing anything else.  It stood like an immense idol in a temple; and it looked as if all its life it never had done anything else but stand in its perfection to be stared at.  And by its air of self-consciousness, of majesty, of arrogant power in repose, you gathered that it knew it was there to be stared at.  The thing was drawn up at the far end of the garage, where no breath could blow on it, over an open pit.  You knew that Kendal, the chauffeur, went down on a ladder into the pit to examine the