It was strange; but until the night of that hateful dinner at the
Carlton, I had never been in a motor car. Half my friends had them, or
meant to have them; but in a kind of lofty obstinacy I had refused to
be a "tooled down" to Brighton or elsewhere. Fancying myself
considerably as a whip, and being an enthusiastic lover of horses, I
had taken up an attitude of hostility to their mechanical rivals, and
chuckled with malice whenever I saw in the papers that any
acquaintance had been hauled up for going beyond the "legal limit."

But on the night of the Carlton dinner, when Molly Winston whirled me
from Pall Mall to Park Lane, that part of me which was not frozen by
the grocer (the part the psychologists call the "unconscious secondary
self") told me that I was having another startling experience apart
from being jilted.

Winston is my oldest friend, and when his letters were mere pæans in
praise of automobilism, I looked upon his fad with compassionate
indulgence. Then we met in London after his marriage, and between the
confidences which we had exchanged, he managed to sandwich in
something about motor cars. But I ruthlessly swept aside the
interpolation as unworthy of notice. When he suggested a drive in the
new car, I called up all my tact to evade the invitation. If the
active part of me had not been stunned on the night when Helen threw
me over, I believe I should have kept bright the jewel of consistency.
But the kindness of Molly in circumstances the opposite of kind, had
undone me. Here I was, pledged to get myself up like a figure of Fun,
and sit glued for days to the seat of a noisy, jolting, ill-smelling
machine which I hated, feeling (and looking), in my goggles and hairy
coat, like a circus monkey or a circus dragon.