I found my mood had completely changed. I could even examine Ethel’s photograph with a whistling ease, for everything else I had a bounding pulse and a flattering eye. And I knew why--it was because I was falling in love with Miss Pascal, and that it would make me exquisitely happy so to do. I could hardly realise Ethel existed, and felt quite care-free whether she did or not. I knew the reaction must come, but for the moment I was anæsthetised and thinking only of the morrow. I called for Margaret early. The Franks are pleasant hunting, shooting and horticultural nonentities, and I think they were a little astonished at my precipitance; for my reputation is not exactly that of one who chooses to spend a whole day alone with a strange female. But it was the happiest day I had ever spent. I found in Margaret just that congruent complement of myself--association with which makes life worth living--and nothing else does. She was twenty-nine, very straight and strong. Her features I never have bothered about, though I gathered that a good many other men had. She has an admirable instinct for pictures, music and the written word, and her critical sense is quick and certain. I gathered she had practised at all three for a time, but had gallantly renounced each in turn, realising she could never transcend mediocrity. “I prefer,” she said, “to criticise the successes of others happily, than to face my own failures with angry tears in my eyes. In many a second-rate painter and writer is buried a first-rate critic. A little talent is a cruel thing.” In the afternoon I took her for a fifty-mile run. Driving a car is one of my few accomplishments, and a lust for speed one of the very few unexpected traits in my character (a capacity for flinging my wife down a row of steps is the only other one I can recall). My Ponitz has done 110 miles an hour at Brooklands and is the fastest car on the road I have ever known. Motor shop is the most boring of all, for fooling about with a car is for most people merely a substitute for thought. It is not so with me. Timid by nature, I resolved to conquer this timidity. Driving was an agony to me at first; I imagined a crash at every corner, and a corpse in every adjacent pedestrian, but slowly I gained confidence, and then my curious, restless mania for speed asserted itself. I asked Margaret if she minded fast driving. “Go ahead,” she replied, “and I’ll tell you afterwards.” There was a perfect three-mile straight on the way home, and we touched eighty. She was in her element. “Take me again,” she cried. “It was simply glorious, and I’ve never seen such perfect control. I don’t mean to be personal, but it seemed to me you became a different person as soon as we reached sixty, somehow defiant and austere.” “How far would you like to go next time?” I asked. “Past the Plunge of Plummet?” and felt a fool for asking. She looked at me sharply and flushed slightly.