The Motor Maid

								

would be nothing less than lèse majesté to fob him off with little
letters about the size of his two lower eye-tusks, or chin-molars, or
whatever one ought to call them.
He was on the floor, you see, keeping guard over his mistress's shoes;
and he might have been misguided enough to think I had designs on
them--though what I could have used them for, unless I'd been going to
Venice and wanting a private team of gondolas, I can't imagine.
I being in the upper berth, you might (if you hadn't seen him) have
fancied me safe; but already he had once padded half-way up the
step-ladder, and sniffed at me speculatively, as if I were a piece of
meat on the top shelf of a larder; and if half-way up, why not all the
way up? Il était capable du tout.
I tried to distract my mind and focus it hard on other things, as
Christian Scientists tell you to do when you have a pin sticking into
your body for which les convenances forbid you to make an exhaustive
search.
I lay on my back with my eyes shut, trying not to hear any of the sounds
in the wagon-lit (and they were not confined to the snoring of His
Majesty), thinking desperately. "I will concentrate all my mentality,"
said I to myself, "on thoughts beginning with P, for instance. My Past.
Paris. Pamela."
Just for a few minutes it was comparatively easy. "Dear Past!" I sighed,
with a great sigh which for divers reasons I was sure couldn't be heard
beyond my own berth. (And though I try always even to think in
English, I find sometimes that the words group themselves in my head in
the old patterns--according to French idioms.) "Dear Past, how thou wert
kind and sweet! How it is brutalizing to turn my back upon thee and thy
charms forever!"
"Oh, my goodness, I shall certainly die!" squeaked a voice in the berth
underneath; and then there was a sound of wallowing.
She (my stable-companion, shall I call her?) had been giving vent to all
sorts of strange noises at intervals, for a long time, so that it would
have been hopeless to try and drown my sorrows in sleep.
Away went the Gentle Past with a bump, as if it had knocked against a
snag in the current of my thoughts.
Paris or Pamela instead, then! or both together, since they seem
inseparable, even when Pamela is at her most American, and tells me to
"talk United States."
It was all natural to think of Pamela, because it was she who gave me
the ticket for the train de luxe, and my berth in the wagon-lit. If
it hadn't been for Pamela I should at this moment have been crawling
slowly, cheaply, down Riviera-ward in a second-class train, sitting bolt
upright in a second-class carriage with smudges on my nose, while
perhaps some second-class child shed jammy crumbs on my frock, and its
second-class baby sister howled.
"Oh, why did I leave my peaceful home?" wailed the lady in the lower
berth.
Heaven alone (unless it were the dog) knew why she had, and knew how