Mrs. Porter released the clutch and set out on her drive. She rarely had a settled route for these outings of hers, preferring to zigzag about New York, livening up the great city at random. She always drove herself and, having, like a good suffragist, a contempt for male prohibitions, took an honest pleasure in exceeding a man-made speed limit.
One hesitates to apply the term “joy-rider” to so eminent a leader of contemporary thought as the authoress of The Dawn of Better Things, Principles of Selection, and What of Tomorrow? but candour compels the admission that she was a somewhat reckless driver. Perhaps it was due to some atavistic tendency. One of her ancestors may have been a Roman charioteer or a coach-racing maniac of the Regency days. At any rate, after a hard morning’s work on her new book she felt that her mind needed cooling, and found that the rush of air against her face effected this satisfactorily. The greater the rush, the quicker the cooling. However, as the alert inhabitants of Manhattan Island, a hardy race trained from infancy to dodge taxicabs and ambulance wagons, had always removed themselves from her path with their usual agility, she had never yet had an accident.
But then she had never yet met George Pennicut. And George, pawn of fate, was even now waiting round the corner to upset her record.
George, man of all work to Kirk Winfield, one of the youngest and least efficient of New York’s artist colony, was English. He had been in America some little time, but not long enough to accustom his rather unreceptive mind to the fact that, whereas in his native land vehicles kept to the left, in the country of his adoption they kept to the right; and it was still his boneheaded practice, when stepping off the sidewalk, to keep a wary lookout in precisely the wrong direction.
The only problem with regard to such a man is who will get him first. Fate had decided that it should be Lora Delane Porter.
Today Mrs. Porter, having circled the park in rapid time, turned her car down Central Park West. She was feeling much refreshed by the pleasant air. She was conscious of a glow of benevolence toward her species, not excluding even the young couple she had almost reduced to mincemeat in the neighbourhood of Ninety-Seventh Street. They had annoyed her extremely at the time of their meeting by occupying till the last possible moment a part of the road which she wanted herself.
On reaching Sixty-First Street she found her way blocked by a lumbering delivery wagon. She followed it slowly for a while; then, growing tired of being merely a unit in a procession, tugged at the steering-wheel, and turned to the right.
George Pennicut, his anxious eyes raking the middle distance—as usual, in the wrong direction—had just stepped off the kerb. He received the automobile in the small of the back, uttered a yell of surprise and dismay, performed a few improvised Texas Tommy steps, and fell in a heap.
In a situation which might have stimulated another to fervid speech, George Pennicut contented himself with saying “Goo!” He was a man of few words.
Mrs. Porter stopped the car. From all points of the compass citizens began to assemble, many swallowing their chewing-gum in their excitement. One, a devout believer in the inscrutable ways of Providence, told a friend as he ran that only two minutes before he had almost robbed himself of this spectacle by going into a moving-picture palace.
Mrs. Porter was annoyed. She had never run over anything before except a few chickens, and she regarded the incident as a blot on her escutcheon. She was incensed with this idiot who had flung himself before her car, not reflecting in her heat that he probably had a prenatal tendency to this sort of thing inherited from some ancestor who had played “last across” in front of hansom cabs in the streets of London.
She bent over George and passed experienced hands over his portly form. For this remarkable woman was as competent at first aid as at anything else. The citizens gathered silently round in a circle.
“It was your fault,” she said to her victim severely. “I accept no liability whatever. I did not run into you. You ran into me. I have a jolly good mind to have you arrested for attempted suicide.”
This aspect of the affair had not struck Mr. Pennicut. Presented to him in these simple words, it checked the recriminatory speech which, his mind having recovered to some extent from the first shock of the meeting, he had intended to deliver. He swallowed his words, awed. He felt dazed and helpless. Mrs. Porter had that effect upon men.
Some more citizens arrived.
“No bones broken,” reported Mrs. Porter, concluding her examination. “You are exceedingly fortunate. You have a few bruises, and one knee is slightly wrenched. Nothing to signify. More frightened than hurt. Where do you live?”
“There,” said George meekly.
“Where?”
“Them studios.”
“No. 90?”
“Yes, ma’am.” George’s voice was that of a crushed worm.
“Are you an artist?”
“No, ma’am. I’m Mr. Winfield’s man.”
“Whose?”
“Mr. Winfield’s, ma’am.”
“Is he in?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’ll fetch him. And if the policeman comes along and wants to know why you’re lying there, mind you tell him the truth, that you ran into me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Very well. Don’t forget.”
“No, ma’am.”
She crossed the street and rang the bell over which was a card bearing the name of Kirk Winfield. Mr. Pennicut watched her in silence.
Mrs. Porter pressed the button a second time. Somebody came at a leisurely pace down the passage, whistling cheerfully. The door opened.
It did not often happen to Lora Delane Porter to feel insignificant, least of all in the presence of the opposite sex. She had well-defined views upon man. Yet, in the interval which elapsed between the opening of the door and her first words, a certain sensation
