as the Bible would put it, it did seem to him distinctly foolish, not to
say careless, not to say out and out incendiary, for any girl to go
blushing her way like a fire-brand through a world so palpably populated
by young men whose heads were tow, and hearts indisputably tinder,
rather than tender.

"Yes! You!" he reasserted vehemently at the end of another silent mile.

Then plainly begrudging this second inexcusable interruption of his most
vital musings concerning Spinal Meningitis he scowled his way savagely
back again into his own grimly established trend of thought.

Excited by so much perfectly good silence that nobody seemed to be using
the Little Crippled Girl ventured gallantly forth once more into the
hazardous conversational land of grown-ups.

"Father?" she experimented cautiously with most commendable discretion.

Fathoms deep in abstraction the Senior Surgeon stared unheeding into the
whizzing black road. Pulses and temperatures and blood-pressures were
seething in his mind; and sharp sticks and jagged stones and the general
possibilities of a puncture; and murmurs of the heart and râles of the
lungs; and a most unaccountable knock-knock-knocking in the engine; and
the probable relation of middle-ear disease; and the perfectly positive
symptoms of optic neuritis; and a damned funny squeak in the steering
gear!

"Father?" the Little Girl persisted valiantly.

To add to his original concentration the Senior Surgeon's linen collar