secret being of the car; you knew it and yet it was incredible.  You refused to believe that an outrage to which common cars were subject ever had been or would be perpetrated on this holy one.  You would have said that no spot of mud or dust or rain had ever lighted on it; it might have descended into the garage out of heaven for any sign of travel that it showed.  It was surrounded by I know not what atmosphere of consecration and immunity.

So that Norah’s first question sounded like a profanity.

“What speed is it?” she said.

It might have been fancy, but I thought that Jevons’s face underwent a change.  I certainly saw Kendal the chauffeur looking at it.

“Speed?” he said.  “Speed?  Well—­you can speed her up to sixty miles an hour if you want to.” (He seemed to say, “If she ever is speeded up,” or “You jolly well may want.”)

He ran his hand lovingly along the car’s white flank as if it were alive and could respond to the caress.

“She’s a beauty,” he said.

The chauffeur looked at him again.

“You won’t want to knock her about like you did the last one, Mr. Jevons,” he said.

And Jimmy’s face expressed a sort of horror.

The chauffeur looked at us then, and, if you can wink without any motion of the eyelids, he winked.  He saw, and he was trying to indicate to us, the state that Jevons had fallen into.

It was infatuation; it was idolatry; it was the most extraordinary passion I have ever known a man otherwise sane to be possessed by.  You would have said that that creature with the black-and-white body and the terrific bowels of machinery had some sinister and magic power over him.  He loved it; he worshipped it; he was afraid of it.  And when you think of how, as the chauffeur said, he had “served” the other car—­

Knock her about, indeed!  He daren’t take her out of the garage for a fifteen-mile run without agonies of apprehension.  He never took her out at all unless he was certain that it wouldn’t rain and that there wouldn’t be any mud or any dust or any wind (I don’t know what harm he thought the wind would do her).  Instead of taking her out he would spend hours in the garage standing still and looking at her, stooping sometimes to examine her for a spot or a crack on her enamel, but always with reverence.  I believe he never touched her without washing his hands first.

We had been at Amershott a week and we hadn’t been out in that car three times, though the weather was perfect.  Jimmy never could see that it was perfect enough.  If it hadn’t rained for two days he was afraid of dust; if it did rain he was afraid of mud; what he wanted was one light shower to lay the dust; and when he got it he was afraid of another shower coming.  And on hot days he was afraid the sun might do something.  And he was afraid of us all the time lest we should ask him to take the car out on a day that wouldn’t do.