I guess I wasn’t any better myself, and quite a coolness sprang up all around.

The repair bills came to a good deal of money, and the eighteen dollars a month we paid at the garage was the least of the total.  The Henry Ward Beecher agent had told Harry it cost a cent a mile to run a Fearless, but if he had said a dollar-eighty he would have been nearer the mark.  Mr. Hoover said cheerfully he knew only one person who had got automobiling down to bed-rock, and that was pa!  But for the rest of the syndicate it was their life’s blood.  It began to dawn on Harry and Nelly that they could never get married at all, as long as they stayed in the combine.  It had cost them all the money they had saved to come in, and now it was taking every cent they had to stay in.  Nelly used to cry about it, though I never noticed that it made any difference in her taking out the car, which she did regularly, and didn’t let me ride with her unless I paid a dollar each time in advance.  She said she didn’t know any other way of saving money.

Altogether, you wouldn’t have known us for the same three people, we had all grown so horrid and changed and mercenary.  Nelly was hankering to get married, while I was crazy to put in a radiator with a forced water circulation (ours was a silly old kind that boiled on you), and Harry wobbled one way and the other as though he couldn’t make up his mind—­sometimes agreeing with her, and sometimes frantic for a radiator.  It looked as though the Fearless was going to make it a lifetime engagement, and Harry, said ruefully that their marriage was not only, made in Heaven, but would probably take place there.  I should have felt sorrier for them if they hadn’t been so horrid to me about it.  From the way they talked, you’d think I had started the syndicate idea myself and had lured them into it against their own better judgment.  They were nasty about pa, too, and said he was acting dishonorably with his blank days, and that as a new machine always had to be broken in and notoriously cost more for repairs the first year than ever afterward, he was meanly benefiting himself at our expense.  Harry called it pa’s “unearned increment” and seemed to think it was an outrage.

They struck a whole row of troubles about this time, too—­stripping a gear, losing a front wheel on the main street and winding up by fracturing the whole transmission into finders.  Nelly would hardly speak to me on the street, and the Gasoline Child told me they would be cheaply out of it at eighty dollars.  Pa was the only person who didn’t share the general depression.  In fact, he never seemed to be so happy as when the car was stripped in the shop and sure to stay there.  He used to go around there occasionally and tell them they needn’t hurry—­and they didn’t!