They are, as even the
poet when most anxious to make the best of them mournfully confesses:
variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made.
Inconstant in everything, they soon cast aside the toy which had taught
them so great a lesson and served them so well, carrying them so far in
the direction they wished to go. And no sooner had they cast it aside
than a fresh toy, another piece of mechanism, came on the scene to
captivate their hearts, and instead of a help, to form a hindrance. The
motor not only carried them back over all the ground they had covered
on the bicycle, but further still, almost back to the times of chairs
and fans and smelling-salts and sprained ankles at Lyme Regis. A
painful sight was the fair lady not yet forty and already fat,
overclothed and muffled up in heavy fabrics and furs, a Pekinese
clasped in her arms, reclining in her magnificent forty-horse-power car
with a man (Homo sapiens) in livery to drive her from shop to
shop and house to house. One could shut one's eyes until it passed -
shut them a hundred or five hundred times a day in every thoroughfare
in every town in England; but alas! one couldn't shut out the fact that
this spectacle had fascinated and made captive the soul of womankind,
that it was now their hope, their dream, their beautiful ideal - the one
universal ideal that made all women sisters, from the greatest ladies
in the land downwards, and still down, from class to class, even to the
semi-starved ragged little pariah girl scrubbing the front steps of a
house in Mean Street for a penny.
The splendid spectacle has now been removed from their sight, but is it
out of mind? Are they not waiting and praying for the war to end so
that there may be petrol to buy and men returned from the front to cast
off their bloodstained clothes and wash and bleach their blackened
faces, to put themselves in a pretty livery and drive the ladies and
their Pekinese once more?
A friend of mine once wrote a charming booklet entitled Wheel
Magic, which was all about his rambles on the machine and its
effect on him. He is not an athlete - on the contrary he is a bookish
man who has written books enough to fill a cart, and has had so much to
do with books all his life that one might imagine he had by some
strange accident been born in the reading-room of the British Museum;
or that originally he had actually been a bookworm, a sort of mite,
spontaneously engendered between the pages of a book, and that the
supernatural being who presides over the reading-room had, as a little
pleasantry, transformed him into a man so as to enable him to read the
books on which he had previously nourished himself.
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