orge had not been ready and waiting for
him at the club trouble might have arisen. George understood his host's
mood and respected it. Lucas drove rapidly and fiercely, with
appropriate frowns and settings of cruel teeth; his mien indeed had the
arrogance of the performer who, having given only a fraction of his time
to the acquirement of skill, reckons that he can beat the professional
who has given the whole of his time. Lucas's glances at chauffeurs who
hindered his swiftness were masterpieces of high disdain, and he would
accelerate, after circumventing them, with positive ferocity.

George himself, an implacable critic, could not find fault with the
technique of Lucas's driving. But exacerbation tells, even in the young,
and at Piccadilly Circus, Lucas, in obeying a too suddenly uplifted hand
of a policeman, stopped his engine. The situation, horribly humiliating
for Lucas and also for George, provided pleasure for half the chauffeurs
and drivers in Piccadilly Circus, and was the origin of much jocularity
of a kind then fairly new. Lucas cursed the innocent engine, and George
leapt down to wield the crank. But the engine, apparently resenting
curses, refused to start again. No, it would not start. Lucas leapt down
too. "Get out of the way," he muttered savagely to George, and scowled
at the bonnet as if saying to the engine: "I'm not going to stand any of
your infernal nonsense!" But still the engine refused to start.

The situation, humiliating before, was now appalling. Two entirely
correct young gentlemen, in evening dress, with light overcoats and
opera hats, struggling with a refractory car that in its obstinacy was
far more dignified than themselves--and the car obstructing traffic at
the very centre of the world in the very hour when the elect of Britain
were driving by on the way to _Tristan_ at the Opera! Sebastians both,
they were martyrized by the poisoned arrows of vulgar wit, shot at them
from all sides and especially from the lofty thrones of hansom-cab
drivers. The policeman ordered them to shove the car to the kerb, and
with the aid of a boy and the policeman himself they did so, opposite
the shuttered front of Swan & Edgar's.

The two experts then examined the engine in a professional manner; they
did everything but take it down; they tried in vain all known devices to
conquer the recalcitrancy of engines; and when they had reached despair
and fury George, startlingly visited by an idea, demanded: