The Princess Passes

								

elms, had such an air of happy peace that I wished to stamp it firmly
in my memory. Such mental photographs are convenient when one courts
sleep at night, and has grown weary of counting uncountable sheep
jumping over a stile.
Beyond Caudebec we sailed along a road running high on the shoulder of
the hill, with wide views over the serpentine writhings of the Seine.
Here, Jack urged a turning aside for St. Wandeville or, at least, for
the abbey of Jumièges, poetic with memories of Agnes Sorel, whose
heart lies in the keeping of the monks, though her body sleeps at
Loches. But Molly would countenance no loitering. Her body, she
said, should sleep at Paris that night.
We held straight on, therefore, keeping to a road at the foot of white
cliffs, sometimes near the river, sometimes leaving it. Quickly enough
to please even this unaccountably impatient Molly, we had measured
off the fifty miles separating Havre from Rouen, and slowed down for
the venerable streets of the Norman capital.
"I suppose even you will want to give half an hour to the cathedral
which I love best in France?" Jack inquired, looking back at Molly as
he turned from the quay up the Rue Grand Port, and stopped in the
mellow shade of an incomparable pile which towered above us.
Molly's mushroom, however, was agitated in dissent. She has an
American chin, and an American chin spells determination. We could not
see it, but we knew that it meant business. "You and I will spend
hours in the cathedral another time," she said. "But now--" She did
not finish her sentence, nevertheless a look of comprehension again
lighted up Jack's face, which for the moment was innocent of goggles.
"Molly's so keen on the Maid," said he, "that she can't forgive Rouen
for not really being the scene of the trial and burning. But never
mind, since she wills it, we'll shake the dust off our Michelins, and
when we're outside, you will have got far enough in your motoring
lesson, I think, to try driving."
What the last hour had not taught me (thanks to him) in theory of
coils and accumulators, electromagnets and other things, was scarcely
worth learning. I seemed to have looked through glass walls into the
cylinders, at the fussy little pistons working under control of the
"governor,"--a tyrant, I felt sure. I had already formed a mature
opinion on the question of mechanically operated inlet valves (which
sounded disagreeably surgical), and was able to judge what their
advantage ought to be over those of the old type worked by the suction
of the piston. I could imagine that more than half the fun of owning a
motor car would lie in understanding the thing inside and out; and I
said so.
"It's a little like controlling the elements," Jack answered. "Think
of the difference in this machine, when it's asleep--cold and quiet,
an engine mounted on a frame, a tank of water, a reservoir of cheap
spirit, a pump, a radiator, a magnet, some geared wheels fitting