The Gasoline Child soon taught me to run it for myself.  With him by my side I was as brave as a lion, and I took the corners and shaved eternity in a way to make him gasp.  He said he had never been really scared in an automobile before, and he used to look at me with a ready-to-jump expression, as though I were a baby playing with a gun.  You see, I had graduated on Lewis Wentz’s steamer and a twenty-mile clip didn’t feaze me any, though there were times when I’d forget which things to pull, and this always seemed to rattle his little nerves.  It was strange, however, what a coward I was when I first went out by myself.  There was no devil left in me at all, and I was certainly the crawly-crawliest bubbler you ever saw, and I teetered at street-car crossings till everybody went mad.  It might have been worse than it was, though, for the only real trouble I had was chipping the tail off a milk wagon and ramming a silly horse on Eighth Avenue.  When his friends helped him up (he had been standing still at the time, and I had forgotten the low gear always started with a jump) they said his front legs were barked flve dollars’ worth.  I wouldn’t have minded if he had got the five dollars, poor thing, for after ramming him once I became confused at the notoriety I attracted, and, instead of reversing, I threw in the highspeed clutch and rammed him some more.  Oh, yes, he had some right to have a kick coming, though all he did was to look at me reproachfully and then lie down.  He was an Italian vegetable horse, and from the way his friends vociferated they must have thought a lot of him.

Of course, Harry and Nelly were taking their lessons, too, and getting into their individual scrapes in the intervals of my getting into mine.  Pa was the only stock-holder who never came to time, though he used to walk round to the garage on his day to make sure the bubble was at home.  He was awfully mean about his rights and explained the syndicate principle to Mr. Hoover, the head of the establishment, and tipped right and left, so that there shouldn’t be any doubt about the blanks being blanks.  I tried to bluff Mr. Hoover once and take out the car on pa’s day, but I bumped into a regular stone wall.  Pa had given everybody there a typewritten schedule with his days marked in red ink, and the whole thing had become the joke of the garage, till even the wipers grinned when the foreman would call out:  “Syndicate car there, for Miss Lockwood.”

In fact, that car seemed to make everybody mean who was in the least way connected with it.  I was a perfect pig myself, and Harry and Nelly were positively worse.  It was one of our rules that the rider of the day should be answerable for any troubles or breakages that occurred when be (or she) was running the car.  Naturally, there had to be some understanding of this kind, for personality counts a lot in automobiling, and often the chauffeur is more to blame than the machine.  But it was awful what fibs it tempted us into, and how we were always “passing the buck,” as they say in poker.  Nelly got so treacherous that once she told me she didn’t care to use the wagon that day, and would I like to?  She had chewed up the bearings in a front wheel and if I hadn’t suspected her generosity and taken a good look beforehand it would have cost me six dollars!