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Updated: June 23, 2025
And to-morrow you'll be on the road again, and all the days after." "Yes," said Peggy; "I'm SURE you'd much rather stay at home, darling Mother, and have a good rest." "Shall we go and put on our things, Peggy?" replied Mrs. Pethel, rising from her chair. She asked her husband whether he was taking the chauffeur with him. He said he thought not. "Oh, hurrah!" cried Peggy.
"Then I can be on the front seat!" "No, dear," said her mother. "I am sure Mr. Beerbohms would like to be on the front seat." "You'd like to be with mother, wouldn't you?" the girl appealed. I replied with all possible emphasis that I should like to be with Mrs. Pethel.
Pethel's paradox, I was grateful to the daughter for bouncing back among us, and asking how soon we should be ready to start. Pethel looked at his wife, who looked at me and rather strangely asked if I was sure I wanted to go with them. I protested that of course I did. Pethel asked her if SHE really wanted to come. "You see, dear, there was the run yesterday from Calais.
He spoke to me with empressement, saying he was a "very great admirer" of my work. I no longer disliked him. Grierson, armed with counters, had now darted away to secure a place that had just been vacated. Pethel, with a wave of his hand toward the tables, said: "I suppose you never condescend to this sort of thing." "Well " I smiled indulgently. "Awful waste of time," he admitted.
I wondered how it was that she had, in that Cambridge bar-room long ago, counted for Pethel to the extent of matrimony. But from any such room she seemed so utterly remote that she might well be in all respects now an utterly changed woman. She did preeminently look as if much had by some means been taken out of her, with no compensatory process of putting in.
Pethel, that it wasn't fast driving, but only bad driving, that was a danger. "There, Mother!" cried Peggy. "Isn't that what we're always telling you?" I felt that they were always either telling Mrs. Pethel something or, as in the matter of that intended bath, not telling her something. It seemed to me possible that Peggy advised her father about his "investments."
I remonstrated, but he was firm. "Alors," I told the waiter, "pour Monsieur un verre de l'eau fraiche, et pour moi un demi blonde." Pethel asked me to tell him who every one was. I told him no one was any one in particular, and suggested that we should talk about ourselves. "You mean," he laughed, "that you want to know who the devil I am?" I assured him that I had often heard of him.
But presently, when the mother and daughter reappeared in the guise of motorists, it became clear that my aspiration had been set aside. "I am to be with mother," said Peggy. I was inwardly glad that Mrs. Pethel could, after all, assert herself to some purpose.
She blushed, laughed, and bade her father not be so silly. I asked her the cause of her great rage. She said: "He only means I was disappointed. And he was just as disappointed as I was. WEREN'T you, now, Father?" "I suppose they meant well, Peggy," he laughed. "They were QUITE right," said Mrs. Pethel, evidently not for the first time.
Surely Pethel would slacken, hoot. No. Imagine a needle threaded with one swift gesture from afar. Even so was it that we shot, between wagon and road's-edge, through; whereon, confronting us within a few yards inches now, but we swerved was a cart that incredibly we grazed not as we rushed on, on.
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