But the instructor only smiled.  “These two are for the curb,” he said—­“if he bolts or anything like that, you know.  Whoa, Viper!  Still, old man!”

“Viper!” Tish repeated, clutching at the lines.  “Is—­is he—­er—­nasty?”

“Not a bit of it,” said the instructor, while he prepared to hoist her up.  “He’s as gentle as a woman to the people he likes.  His only fault is that he’s apt to take a little nip out of the stablemen now and then.  He’s very fond of ladies.”

“Humph!” said Tish.  “He’s looking at me rather strangely, don’t you think?  Has he been fed lately?”

“Perhaps he sees that divided skirt,” I suggested.

Tish gave me one look and got on the horse.  They walked round the ring at first and Tish seemed to like it.  Then a stableman put a nickel into a player-piano and that seemed to be a signal for the thing to trot.  Tish said afterward that she never hit the horse’s back twice in the same place.  Once, she says, she came down on his neck, and several times she was back somewhere about his tail.  Every time she landed, wherever it might be, he gave a heave and sent her up again.  She tried to say “Whoa,” but it came out in pieces, so to speak, and the creature seemed to be encouraged by it and took to going faster.  By that time, she said, she wasn’t coming down at all, but was in the air all the time, with the horse coming up at the rate of fifty revolutions a second.  She had presence of mind enough to keep her mouth shut so she wouldn’t bite her tongue off.

After four times round the music stopped and the horse did also.  They were just in front of us, and Tish looked rather dazed.

“You did splendidly!” said Aggie.  “Honestly, Tish, I was frightened at first, but you and that dear horse seemed one piece.  Didn’t they, Lizzie?”

Tish straightened out the fingers of her left hand with her right and extricated the lines.  Then she turned her head slowly from right to left to see if she could.

“Help me down, somebody,” she said in a thin voice, “and call an osteopath.  There is something wrong with my spine!”

She was in bed three days, having massage and a vibrator and being rubbed with chloroform liniment.  At the end of that time she offered me her divided skirt, but I refused.

“Riding would be good for your liver, Lizzie,” she said, sitting up in bed with pillows all about her.

“I don’t intend to detach it to do it good,” I retorted.  “What your liver and mine and most of the other livers need these days isn’t to be sent out in a divided skirt and beaten to a jelly:  they need rest—­less food and simpler food.  If instead of taking your liver on a horse you’d put it in a tent and feed it nuts and berries, you wouldn’t be the color you are to-day, Tish Carberry.”

That really started the whole thing, although at the time Tish said nothing.  She has a way of getting an idea and letting it simmer on the back of her brain, as you may say, when nobody knows it’s been cooking at all, and then suddenly bringing it out cooked and seasoned and ready to serve.