E'LL never be able to make Dijon,” declared Gibson grimly, “unless we keep going until midnight. We've already come three hundred and seventy kilometers since nine this morning. Pierre is on the edge of a nervous breakdown and I've got a rotten headache. However, don't mind us! We'll probably reach a palace hotel some time before daybreak!”
And he glared ironically through the rain-spattered window of the limousine at the slumped back of the French chauffeur.
The car was thundering along the high river-road of the Valley of the Doubs through the rapidly dropping twilight, in a heavy rain which made driving difficult and dangerous; and, as Gibson had said, the man was on the brink of hysteria, for he had been at the wheel for five consecutive days of over seven hours each, and during most of that time had averaged sixty kilometers an hour. He was the victim of Fanny Gibson's speed mania, notorious among her social friends. Cars succumbed to it, broke down, smashed up, tires blew out in constant succession, chauffeurs came and chauffeurs went, but she went on forever—at seventy kilometers an hour.
Yearly she left New York in early March, met her car at Cherbourg, and after a week of hectic clothes-buying in Paris, started out on a two-months' endurance contest with her husband over Europe. From Paris she flashed to Aix-les-Bains, Nice, Florence, Rome, and Naples. Northward she whirled around the Italian lakes, through budding Lombardy to Venice, thence over such passes of the rainbow-hued Dolomites as were free of snow, and after a day at Vienna or Budapest scorched back via Salzburg through the Pusterthal, climbed the Arlberg, traversed the Black Forest and the Rhine, and usually made Paris just in time for a final fitting of her new ball dresses and to catch a steamer in time for the Newport season.
They had left Baden-Baden that morning, and Thérèse, Fanny's maid, and Griffin, her husband's valet, had been sent on to Dijon with the baggage by rail, to await the motor's arrival and to engage the best rooms in the hotel with a salon privé for the use of their master and mistress. Hence to stop before reaching Dijon was an obvious impossibility to Fanny Gibson, who suffered agony at the mere thought of asking her husband to hook up her dress,
“But Dijon is only a hundred kilometers farther,” she protested irritably. “And you know there isn't any other place fit for a dog to stay, this side of Paris. What makes you so nervous? we've often done four hundred kilometers in one day. There's at least an hour of light, yet.”
“I was thinking of the man who's steering us,” returned her husband. “Do you realize that he's driven two thousand kilometers in the last five days?”
“Well, isn't that what he's paid for?” she snapped, for she was herself so travel-weary that only pride kept her from tears. She threw herself back among the gray satin cushions of the rear seat and closed her eyes, wondering if motoring was really the fun she had always found it to be.
Gibson shrugged his trim shoulders and lit a slender cigarette which he took out of a gold case from his waistcoat pocket. “Go ahead!” he muttered grimly. “It would serve us right if we got ditched. I don't believe in motoring in this reckless way. It spoils all the enjoyment of it.”
“It has quite obviously spoiled your temper and your manners!” retorted Fanny.
Gibson did not reply. He knew that to do so would be quite useless, and that any word of his would inevitably prove a penultimate to her final fling. Yet the two loved each other, and it was only during these hysteric flights that their good-fellowship was ever marred. It was true that she had changed a good deal since she had married him and had become used to spending so much money. Her extravagance was really phenomenal. Gibson called the shopping excursions in which her friends participated “spending matches.” The motor itself was a sort of triumphal car for her luxurious progress through existence.