The car flew on, increasing a speed that had been unlawful almost from the start.  He wondered what the police were about.  He might write a sharp letter to the newspapers, signed, “Indignant Pedestrian,” only it would be too late.  He was being volleyed at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour into the presence of a man who had that morning sworn at his mother.  He wished he could, say for one day, have Breede back there on the banks of the Nile—­set him to work building a pyramid, or weeding the lotus patch, foot or no foot!  He’d show him!

He switched this resentment to the young female at his side.  He wanted her to quit looking at him that way.  It made him nervous.  But a muffled glance or two at her disarmed this feeling.  She was all right to look at, he thought, had pretty hands and “all that”—­she had stripped off her gloves when they reached the open country—­and she didn’t talk, which was what he most feared in her sex.  He recalled that she had said hardly a word since the start.  He might have supposed himself forgotten had it not been for that look of veiled determination which he encountered as often as he dared.

A young dog dashed from a gateway ahead of them and threatened the car furiously.  They both applied imaginary brakes to the car with feet and hands and taut nerves.  The puppy escaping death by an inch, trotted back to his saved home with an air that comes from duty well performed.  They looked from the dog to each other.

“I’d make them against the law,” said Bean.

“How could you?  The idea!”

“I mean motors, not dogs.”

“Oh!  Of course!”

They had been brought a little together.

“You go in for dogs?” asked the flapper.

He hesitated.  “Going in” for dogs seemed to mean more.  “I’ve got only one just now,” he confessed.

Wooded hills flew by them, the white road flickered forward to their wheels.

“You interested in the movement?” demanded the flapper again.

“Yes,” he said.

“Granny will be delighted to know that.  So many young men aren’t.”

“What make is it?” he inquired, preparing to look enlightened when told the name of the vehicle in which they rode.

“Oh, I mean the Movement—­the movement!”

“Oh, yes,” he faltered.  “Greatly interested!” He remembered the badge on her jacket, and Bulger’s warning about Grandma, the Demon.

“Granny and I marched in the parade this year, clear down to Washington Square.  If she wasn’t so old we’d both run over to London and get arrested in the Strand for breaking windows.”

Bean shuddered.

“We’re making our flag now for the next parade—­big blue cloth with a gold star for every state that has raised woman from her degradation by giving her a vote.”

He shuddered again.  Although of legal years for the franchise, he had never voted.  If you tried to vote some ward-heeler would challenge you and you’d like as not be hauled off to the lock-up.  And what was the good of it!  The politicians got what they wanted.  But this he kept to himself.