He lay on his bed, baffled, mistaken, miserable but not beaten. Time after time, the same vitality that had led his spirit to a scourging made him able to shake off the blood like water not to forget, but to carry his wounds with him to new disasters and new atonements—toward his unknown destiny.
Two days later his mother told him that on condition of his keeping the batteries on charge, and washing it once a week, his grandfather had consented to let him use the electric whenever it was idle in the afternoon. Two hours later he was out in it, gliding along Crest Avenue at the maximum speed permitted by the gears and trying to lean back as if it were a Stutz Bearcat. Imogene Bissel waved at him from in front of her house and he came to an uncertain stop.
“You’ve got a car!”
“It’s grandfather’s,” he said modestly. “I thought you were up on that party at the St. Croix.”
She shook her head. “Mother wouldn’t let me go—only a few girls went. There was a big accident over in Minneapolis and mother won’t even let me ride in a car unless there’s someone over eighteen driving.”
“Listen, Imogene, do you suppose your mother meant electrics?”
“Why, I never thought—I don’t know. I could go and see.”
“Tell your mother it won’t go over twelve miles an hour,” he called after her.
A minute later she ran joyfully down the walk. “I can go, Basil,” she cried. “Mother never heard of any wrecks in an electric. What’ll we do?”
“Anything,” he said in a reckless voice. “I didn’t mean that about this bus making only twelve miles an hour—it’ll make fifteen. Listen, let’s go down to Smith’s and have a claret lemonade.”
“Why, Basil Lee!”
Published in The Saturday Evening Post (29 September 1928).
