They tried to smooth over the situation, but I would listen to none of them, and Johnson at last drove on. Half-way up the hill the motor stuck. Something had gone wrong with it inside, and I felt that we might stay there in the wilderness all night, which would have been impossible, as I had taken very few remedies of any kind with me, and cannot sleep sitting up. These stoppages occurred several times. How we at length got home I scarcely remember. My velvet mantle was like a sponge, my feet so cold that it was all I could do to dismount from the motor when it ground up to the hotel door. There was Sir Archibald standing smoking as if nothing extraordinary had occurred.
'Why, Mrs. MacGill,' he cried, 'you are even later than we were, and I thought that blessed pony was going to her own funeral.'
I thought that in spite of his tone he looked rather pale and agitated; he was of course anxious, and rightly so, about my safety.
'Sir Archibald,' I said, as soon as I could speak,'I trust that I never again may have to enter one of those motors. Human life, especially mine, is too precious to be thrown away in such a fashion. Another half-hour of it would have killed me outright. Had Mr. MacGill been alive he would never have consented to my going into it for a moment. As it is, I can scarcely hear or see owing to the frightful noises and the rain lashing on my face; every hair on my head feels pulled the wrong way, and I'm sure I shall have another bad relapse of influenza by to-morrow morning. Your uncle was a friend of my poor brother-in-law who died at Agra in a moment, and unless you take a warning you will have an end quite as sudden and much more frightful, for his was heart complaint, and you will be smashed to pieces by the wheels of that hideous machine.'
I left them downstairs and went to bed. Cecilia tried to make me believe there was nothing wrong with me, as she always does when she has neuralgia, or _says_ she has neuralgia, herself, but I know that there is. What is the matter I can't exactly say, only I am certain that I am going to suffer in some way from this horrible expedition.
There is something soothing even in hotel tobacco, I suppose, so I was better, though still feeling decidedly blue, later in the day at Widdington, when I came up to the inn door and began overhauling the motor as it stood in the yard. There was nothing particularly cheering in finding several long cuts in the tires, and I was probing them to get the grit out, when I heard a little cough behind me. I turned to see Miss Virginia standing in the doorway, looking at me rather doubtfully. Now of course I had been rather short, not to say nasty, but somehow it's a fact that you cannot be sharp with a woman without at once being put in the wrong, though she may really have been the sinner all the time. It was Miss Virginia who had brought me out on this show, who had cost me about forty pounds in tires, and Heaven knows how much in other ways, but it was I who felt a beast now. Yet she looked at me in a way which seemed to say she was sorry I was vexed. She was rubbing her hands together and shivering a little. Of course she was cold in that ridiculous dress.