"Oh, I think American men are great--are _wonderful_!" she cried, striking her little hands together. "Especially Harvard men--and especially--" She stopped with the faintest catch. "By Jove!" I cried. "Do you _mean_ it?" And for the briefest instant the hands were three; but her scream brought me back to earth just in time to save the lives of a man and a boy. Devilish ungrateful, too, for I could see the man, three blocks behind, and still shaking his fist. The way with these pedestrians! At Fifty-ninth Street we caromed with a hansom trotting too leisurely across the plaza, and I listened for nearly a block to the remarks of a bicycle cop before he dropped behind. What dashed me not a little was Billings' indifference to the record I was making for his car--didn't seem to care a jolly hang. The frump was still hanging on him in a way to make you sick, and cooing and going on in a nervous, half-hysterical way I never would have thought her able to chirp up to. And Billings was holding her hand! "Hello!" I called to him, just after we clipped Yonkers. He looked up at me, smiling and nodding. "Feel all right now, old man?" I inquired cheerily. Billings looked at me hard, and then, dash it, he _winked_! And I began to wonder, by Jove, if it was just plain drunk. CHAPTER XXII MY DARLING IS SLANDERED Three miles south of Irvington, Billings jumped wildly in the air and yelled for me to stop. "A _coleopteran_!" he shrieked excitedly as I throttled down. "A _coleopteran_ struck me in the eye--one of the _hydrophilidae_ family!" And hurling aside rugs and blankets, he twisted open the door and in a moment was in the road running back. It was then I went back to the crazy theory, for it was an open stretch of road and there wasn't a soul in sight. But it was so funny to see his fat figure waddling along there in the pajamas and bedroom slippers that Frances and I just threw back our heads and screamed. Couldn't help it, by Jove! And the frump, jogging along behind, looked just as funny. I wasn't alarmed, for I knew she could control him. And, dash it, she did it by humoring him! For we saw her twist her veil about the fork of the stick he extended to her, and both of them went to slapping wildly at the air and the ground. Presently they both came waddling back, she with a butterfly and he with a bug which he was craning at with a lens he had fished from his sleeve somewhere. He was trying to do this and at the same time hold together a great armful of gaudy weeds he had gathered. Billings got in and then I helped her. "Awfully jolly good of you to humor his crazy whims," I whispered gratefully. "Crazy!" she ejaculated, one foot on the running-board. "Why, he's just getting sane! He's been a born fool all his life! And now, Jacky, as you were saying of the _antennae_--" And she flopped eagerly by him and together they bent over the glass.