“I’ll do better than that,” she declared.  “I’ll drive you downtown myself.”

“But it isn’t necessary,” he persisted.  “I don’t want to take up all your time, and—­”

“For the rest of this day,” Sophie murmured, “I have absolutely nothing to do but kill time.  I get restless, and being out in the car cures that feeling.  Do you mind if I chauff you a few miles more or less?  Don’t be ungallant.  I love to drive.”

“Oh, well.”

Thompson mentally threw up his hands.  In that gracious mood Sophie was irresistible.  He sank back in the thick, resilient upholstery and resolved to take what the gods provided—­to dance as it were, and reckon with the piper when he presented his bill.

CHAPTER XVII

THE REPROOF COURTEOUS(?)

For the few minutes it took the red roadster to slip under the green summits of Twin Peaks and by a maze of boulevards debouch at length upon Valencia and so into the busy length of Market Street their talk ran to commonplaces.  Thompson placed himself unreservedly in Sophie’s hands.  He had to reach an express office on lower Market, get his things, and proceed thence to the house where he had roomed all winter.  Since it suited Miss Carr’s book to convey him to the first point, he accepted the gift of her company gladly.  So in the fullness of time they came into the downtown press of traffic, among which, he observed, Sophie steered her machine like a veteran.

At Third and Market the traffic whistle blocked them with the front wheels over the safety line that guided the flow of cross-street pedestrians, and the point man, crabbed perhaps from a long trick amidst that roaring maze of vehicles, motioned autocratically for her to back up.

Sophie muttered impatiently under her breath and went into reverse.  Behind her the traffic was piling up, each machine stealing every inch of vantage for the go-ahead signal, crowding up wheel to wheel, the nose of one thrusting at the rear fender of the other.  On one side of Sophie rose the base of a safety station for street-car boarders.  Between her car and the curb a long-snouted gray touring-car was edging in.  And as she backed under the imperative command of the traffic officer, one rear hub clinked against the hind fender of the other, jarring both cars a little, dinting the gray one’s fender, marring the glossy finish.

A chauffeur in a peaked cap drove the gray machine.  He looked across at Sophie, scowling.  He was young and red-faced, a pugnacious-looking individual.

“Back to the country, Jane, an’ practice on the farm wagon,” he snarled out of one corner of his mouth.  “Yuh drive like a hick, yuh do.”

“Talk civil to a woman,” Thompson snapped back at him, “or keep your mouth shut.”

The chauffeur bestowed upon him a rancorous glare.  His sharp, ferret eyes gleamed.  Then he deliberately spat upon the impeccably shining red hood of Sophie’s roadster.