Somebody gave him a soft leather helmet, and he buckled it under his chin with clammy fumbling fingers. Colonel Kinney was putting one on over his shiny bald spot. His father never wore anything on his head in Florida, and Gloria and Mrs. Kinney said their hats were quite tight enough. Then they were walking down the slippery plank and getting into the plane. It was a three-seater. Mrs. Kinney and the colonel took the third seat and Gloria and his father the second. The women got in alertly, their high heels clicking on the deck, their sleek knees flashing among their skirts. His father motioned Ronny to sit next to the aviator, because it was his birthday treat. Ronny got in. It was like sitting on a leather cushion in a high-sided tin bathtub, behind the smudged dimness of the short windshield. There were things--rods and handles--dangerous-looking things, between Ronny’s feet, which he would not have touched for worlds, and behind, overhead, the loom and shadow of the great wings. Gloria’s jewelled hand patted his shoulder. “So nice of you, darling, to have this marvellous birthday!” she was crying, in that gay scream which made his very eardrums cringe. Suddenly the roar of the engine exploded in a thuttering numbness of sound that clamped mufflers on their hearing. Ronny felt his skin chill and crawl. They were off. At the same time he had a flash of panicky decision that he must not clench his hands where this aviator could see them. There was something careless and matter-of-fact and young about him, which Ronny suddenly wished that he could emulate. So that, while the plane taxied out on the smooth bay water, rocking a little as it curved and thundered between the high black sides of oil tankers, past white bows of yachts, in an increasing blur of speed, he was equally concerned in watching his hands, fixed in a pose of relaxation, on his knees. He was bracing himself for what he knew must come, the first sickening leap upward. It did not come. There was only a slight adjustment in the angle of the seat. The water at a distance looked lower than it had been. And he suddenly realized that they were up, although he could feel no sensation in himself but a quickening of his heartbeats. All around the plane the sapphire level of the bay was deepening and lowering. The plane ground ceaselessly, climbing with a great, roaring steadiness the orderly staircase of the wind. There was reality in it, and stolidity. Ronny felt a strange sense of lifting upward into a freedom from earthly things, a consciousness of wide salt wind and tremendous reaches of sunny air. He had forgotten about relaxing his hands now, and his heart was pounding, but in him climbed, as the plane climbed, an amazement and a new delight. He was hardly afraid at all. It was astonishing. It was delicious.