"Does it blow much in your car?" she called to him in a quavery voice. He assured her that it was quite desirably calm. "The Stokes car is most delightful," she said. "Just like sitting in my own room. Not the sign of a bump--and I could not realize we had been going twenty-five miles an hour." He smiled politely. "We'll see what this one will do." "I've been struggling to keep off this evil hour for, oh, so long," she explained as she followed him timidly down the walk to the curb. "It was a terrible thing when the world went mad for haste and now has to be jerked around from place to place without ever drawing a sane breath. I've two horses and three carriages, one a Victoria that I bought in Paris. What am I going lo do with these if I buy your car, Mr. Hooper? Oh, what a pretty car!" She narrowed her sharp little eyes--she was quite near sighted--and stepped out into the street and around the rear of the automobile, caught sight of her image in the back panel, came around and felt of the leather in the seat, rubbed the polished surface of the bow socket as though she had bought motors for years. Then she turned to Joe: "And the engine? Is it a good engine?" "It is guaranteed to be the best." And then he went on quietly to tell her a few of the more spectacular things about it. He did not overdo it. As he was speaking she was watching his face with a dreamy, vague expression on her wrinkled features. When he had finished, she brightened and laid her hand on his arm. "And now let's go for a nice ride." She was as enthusiastic as a girl. "I'm sure this is a nice car." They went out in the country a short distance, out on the Bloomfield pike. She found he was from Bloomfield and trilled away in a high, shrill cackle that she loved every stick and stone in that adorable country. And when she found that he was the nephew of Mrs. Mosby, or, rather, Loraine Fawcette, that was, her ecstasy knew no bounds. "Why, I took Tom LeMasters away from her," she giggled, and leaned over with her wrinkled and scented face close to his, grasping him by the arm. After that they were bosom friends. He told her about Bloomfield as it came back to him, rhapsodized over its meadows and woods and "purling streams," and felt a rising desire to taste its joys again. And all the while his voice would fall on deaf ears and her eyes would take on a misty look as though peering down dark, dusty corridors; and interrupting him, she would recall the circumstances of some famous party, summoning forth the creaking images of old men and women, yellow and withering, some of them long dead.