was going to drown it that very night!
By seven o'clock we had lifted the thing on five fence-rails and the breadboard sign, and Mr. Lewis announced it was now or never. The girl had not come near us. She had taken off her veil and smoothed up her hair, and was busy with a bit of a silver mirror. She was very pretty.
Mr. Lewis got into the car and put on the power. There was a terrible grinding, but nothing moved. From behind, the three of us shoved, and Aggie said between gasps that if anything gave way her niece was to have her amethyst pin.
"Anne!" cried the young gentleman. But Miss Anne was powdering her nose and we all saw her turn it up.
"Anne!" called the young man who was not her young man, "you'll have to help here."
"Help yourself," said Anne coolly, and, moistening her finger, she proceeded to wipe the powder off her eyebrows.
Mr. Lewis shut off the engine, got out of the car and put on his coat. The girl did not turn her head, but she was watching through the mirror, for as he picked up his cap she rose lazily, put away her toilet things and started in our direction.
"What shall I do?" she asked Tish, ignoring him.
"Push," said Tish sharply— "unless you are too lame."
"My being lame won't matter, unless you wish me to kick the machine out," retorted the girl sweetly; and with that, the power being on, she put her brown arms against the car and her shoulder-muscles leaped up under her thin dress, and before I had planted my feet in the ditch the car rose, clung for a minute to the edge, and was over into the road. The girl said nothing. She looked at her hands, stepped out of the ditch, patronizingly helped Aggie out of it, and swung up the path with her head in the air. When I saw her again she had taken the sign off the pump and thrown it in the grass, and was washing her hands unconcernedly while the woman stood in the door and yapped at her.
If she had a mite of sense she would have gone back to the city in the blue car and let us go home to bed. But when she had come back to the road and the young man suggested it—not to her, of course, but casually to us— she whistled to her dog and started to limp down the road. You can't do anything with It girl in that state of mind, I took her in the tonneau with me, and Aggie, who prefers a love affair to a scandal and always reads the marriage licenses with the obituaries—Aggie went in the blue car to keep Mr. Lewis from being lonely.
Chapter IV.
The Appetizers and the Hotel Bureau
We didn't talk very much. Tish was anxious to show she could drive, for all she had sat us down in a ditch, and after she took a wrong turning and stampeded a herd that was being milked in a barnyard, I could not keep my mind off the road. Once I looked at the girl, and there were tears running down her nose and dropping into her lap. I gave her my smelling salts, which I always carry in Tish's machine, and after a while she reached over and slid her hand into mine.
"I shouldn't care if the car went to pieces," she said. "I'd be happier dead."
"If you are always as unpleasant to that young man as you were this evening, I doubt it," I snapped.
"Didn't you ever quarrel with your husband before you were married?" she demanded, looking at me sideways.
"I thank Heaven I never had a husband," I replied, and with that she looked uncomfortable and drew her hand away.
"Is your—friend married?" she inquired. And it took me a moment to realize that she meant Aggie and that the minx was jealous. Aggie is fifty, and so thin that when she wears a tailor-made suit she has to build out with pneumatics. You remember, at the Woman's Suffrage Convention, how Mrs. Bailey pinned a badge to Aggie, and how there was a slow hissing immediately, and Aggie caved in before our very eyes?
Mr. Lewis checked our wild career after a few miles by getting ahead of us, and we got into town about eight. But after we had left the girl at her house—an imposing place, with a man at the door and a limousine at the curb —it was too late to go back home. Aggie and the blue car were waiting down the street, and they piloted us to the hotel.
Now, Tish belongs to the Ladies' Relief Corps of the G. A. R., and when Mr. Lewis said we looked tired and that he was going to order supper for us all, and three Martinis, Tish said it was all right, although she didn't see why we needed guns. It looked like a safe place. But they were not guns—that's part of the story.
While we were washing for supper Aggie told us what the quarrel was about.
"They are—were— engaged," she said, "and the girl's father is Robertson—the boss of the city, Mr. Lewis called him. And Mr. Lewis is the youngest councilman—they call him 'Baby' Lewis, and he hates it—and there's something to be voted for to-morrow; and if Mr. Lewis is for it he is to get the girl."
"And the girl refuses to be sold!" Tish said triumphantly. "Quite right, too. I admire her strength. That's the typical womanly attitude these days—right before anything, honor above all." Tish waved the hairbrush and then she turned on the maid. "Girl," she snapped, "why is this brush chained?"
"The ladies steal them," said the girl. Tish stared at the chain.
"You are so quick, Letitia," Aggie protested. "It was the other way round. The girl was angry because he wouldn't sell his vote, even for her."
Tish sat down in a chair, speechless; but just then Mr. Lewis came to the door and said that supper and the Martinis were ready. The Martinis proved to be something to drink, and after Mr. Lewis had raised his hand and sworn there was no whisky in them we drank them. He said they were appetizers, and the other day Tish said she was going to write to the Sherman House for the recipe before she has the minister to dinner next week.
Never did I eat so delightful a meal. Tish forgot her sprained shoulder and the splinter under her nail, and Aggie talked about the roofer. And the food! I recall distinctly shaking hands with Tish and agreeing to come to the hotel to live, and asking the waiter to find out from the cook how something or other was made. And when Aggie had buried the roofer, and Tish said it was funny, but Mr. Lewis had four brown eyes instead of two, he suggested that we must be tired, and a boy took us to our room. Room, not rooms. We could only get one. The last things I remember are our shaking hands with Mr. Lewis, and that Tish tried to get into the elevator before the door was opened.
About eleven o'clock I heard some one groaning and I sat up in bed. It was Aggie, whom, being the thinnest, we had put on the cot. She said her nose was smarting from the sunburn and she had heartburn something awful. We rang for some baking soda, and she drank some in water and made a plaster for her nose with the rest. After a while she felt better, but we were all wide awake and the heat was terrible. We could look out the window and see there was a breeze, but not a breath came in.
We sent for the bell-boy again, and he said there wasn't another room and nobody he could move around to give us a room on the breezy side of the house.
We took the rules and regulations card off the door and fanned with it, but it did not help much. After half an hour or so Tish got up, pushed the washstand in front of a door that connected with the next room and crawled up on it.
"If I had a chair," she said, measuring the distance with her eye, "I could see if that corner room next door is occupied. I could tell by that boy's
