Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/38

28 Then she fell in love with Biquet, the second chauffeur, who had been a flying-man and had a slashing wound of honor across his well-tanned young cheek-bone. But her feeling for Biquet proved an odd confusion of issues, for she found that she liked him only when he permitted her to assist in eviscerating one of the car-engines or let her help overhaul and assemble the landaulet's differential, with her ready little paws covered with oil and axle- grease and her white corduroy frock as black as a sweep's. But she realized, on witnessing Biquet kissing the pantry-maid, one night when blockade-running for certain residuary oyster pâtés, that it was not really Biquet she loved, but the machinery over which he presided. There was a time, too, during this period of potential romantic alliances, when she might possibly have entertained some tenderer feeling for Gerry Rhindelander West, her next-door neighbor whose grilled iron gateway in the midst of its manorial stone wall was quite as munificent as her own. But Gerry disappointed her. He