Rejecting travellers’ tales in favour of the report of personal experience, Punch decided that if he could maintain an average of thirty-five miles an hour he would do extremely well. If he allowed two hours for meals and rest, that would bring him to Biarritz by ten o’clock. To shave, bathe, change and locate Athalia would take the best part of an hour. Eleven o’clock. Punch wrinkled his nose. Mercifully Miss Choate kept late hours . . . mercifully. . . . And this was assuming that he ran to time. With a sigh, Fairfax took out tobacco and lighted a pipe. By what hour the Hispano-Suiza could reach Biarritz he deliberately declined to calculate. The answer could do no good and would be discouraging. Given a car which can average fifty upon the open road, and a chauffeur to take the wheel when you feel tired. . . . But then who was to say that Beringhampton would go straight through? Besides . . . Fairfax folded his map and took off his collar and shoes. Then he lay down on the seat and wished for the day. This came in due season, fresh and cloudless: but other things first—the port of Dieppe, for instance, and shouts and clangings of the telegraph. A press of miserable passengers, cold, heavy-laden, white-faced, squeezed and fought its way towards the steep gangway, stumbled up the rude slope, clattered over setts and metals and swarmed nervously into a grisly Custom House, there to protest despairingly that it had ‘nothing to declare.’ Blue-jerseyed porters, frantic with excitement, panted and screamed and staggered under stupendous loads. A steam crane swung to and fro about its business, responding with an uncanny intelligence to the medley of confused directions constantly hurled at its cab. Trucks, seemingly designed for uproar, bumped and rumbled and crashed from quay to platform, their governors bawling for ‘_Attention_’ in a monotonous drawl. A man in charge of a refreshment-waggon was crying his wares: another shouted recurringly that the train would not depart for thirty minutes and urged the prudence of a meal at the buffet: a boy was dismally chanting the names of newspapers; a porter who had lost his patrons was howling “_Soixante-dix_”: four Frenchmen were arguing explosively about ‘summer time’: a terrier was barking like a fiend: over all, the deafening roar of escaping steam strengthened the resemblance of the scene to the evacuation of hell. As if to clinch its identity, here and there stood the cloaked and hooded figures of Authority, motionless, silent, indifferent to the bustle and hubbub, smoking contemptuously, sinister, lynx-eyed. Their deliberate detachment from struggling humanity, their sullen observance and studied disregard of a thousand needs, were arguing a stony misanthropy, malicious, Satanic.