The car of thirty-five million dove-power sped through the highways of sunny France—through enchanted forest glades, over mountains of the moon; through cities of wonderland, so, at least, it seemed to two young souls. For Clementina, alas, the glamour of sky and sunshine and greenery had departed. For Johnson, happy possessor of a carburation in lieu of a temperament it had never existed. From Valence they struck north-west, though St. Etienne, Roanne, Nevers, Bourges. It was at Bourges that she came upon the two young people unawares.
She had entered, not knowing where they were, for they had gone off together, the cloistered courtyard of the Hôtel de Jacques Cœur. Now the cloister forms an arcaded gallery a few feet above the ground, which is reached by a flight of steps. She heard voices, approached hidden from them, beheld the pair sitting on the bottom step, in the cool shadow.
“I should never get the whole adorableness of this,” said Tommy, “if I hadn’t you beside me. You and I seem to be like the two barrels of a field-glass—adjusted to one focus.”
Clementina, hugging the wall, tip-toed out of the cloister. There was only one alternative, a whirlwind, a hurricane of a temptation which she was strong enough to resist: to descend then and there and box his ears soundly.
While Clementina, in her own fashion, was shattering an idyll to pieces, Quixtus under the tutelage of Billiter pursued the most distasteful occupation in which he had ever engaged. Had some Rhadamanthine Arbiter of his Destiny compelled him, under penalty of death, to choose between horse-racing and laborious practice as a solicitor, he would unhesitatingly have chosen the latter. Course and stand and paddock and ring, the whole machinery of the sport, wearied him to exasperation. Just as there are some men to whom, as the saying goes, music is the most expensive form of noise, so are there others to whom the racing of horses is merely the most extravagantly cumbersome form of gambling. Why train valuable animals, they ask; to run round a field, when the same end could be attained by making little leaden horses gyrate mechanically round a disk, at a millionth part of the cost? Of the delight of studying pedigree, of following form, of catching the precious trickles of information that percolate through the litter of stables, of backing their judgment thus misguided they have no notion. They cannot even feel a thrill of excitement at the sight of the far-off specks of galloping horses. They wonder at the futility of it all as the quadrupeds scrabble down the straight. An automobile, they plead, can go ten times as fast. That such purblind folk exist is sad; but after all they are God’s creatures, just the same as jockeys and professional tipsters.