Page:A M Williamson - The Motor Maid.djvu/153

 T WOULD be a singularly hard-headed, cold-hearted person who could set out for Vaucluse without the smallest thrill; and hard heads and cold hearts don't "run in our family." As we spun away from the Hotel de l'Europe soon after two o'clock that afternoon I felt that I was largely composed of thrill. Cold as the wind had grown, the thrill kept me warm, mingling in my veins with ozone.

Inside the car the middle-aged honeymooners had an air of desperate resignation which the consciousness of doing their duty according to Baedeker gives to tourists. The tap was turned on in the newly invented heating-apparatus in the car floor, through which hot water from the radiator can be made to circulate; and I wondered, if this extreme measure were resorted to already, what would be left to do when we reached those high, white altitudes of which the chauffeur had been speaking. I prayed that Lady Turnour might not read in the papers about the "phenomenal fall of snow" in those regions, for if she did I was afraid that even Mr. Dane's magnetic powers of persuasion might fail to get her there. He might dangle Queen Margherita of Italy over her head in vain, if worst came to worst: for what are queens to the most inveterate tuft-hunters if the feet be cold? Yet now that "adventures" were Rh