g. Aggie was feeling in her knitting bag
for the glasses.

"Is she pretty?" she asked.

"Too pretty to be a second choice," I replied, shortly. "She's a nice
little thing, and deserves something better than a warmed-over heart."

Tish had been angry enough before, but when I told her that he had been
disappointed in love, and was merely making the girl a tool, her eyes
were savage.

"She is pretty," Aggie observed. "Perhaps, after all, he _does_ love
her. Or if not he may learn to. And he cannot be very unhappy about
marrying her. He said, you know, it was a perfect day."

"Go down and get into the car," Tish said, in a choking voice. "I'll fix
his perfect day for him. Go down and start the engine."

I took a last glance as Aggie and I left the License Court, and if we
had had any doubts they vanished then, because he was speaking to the
girl with angry gestures, and she was certainly crying.

"Brute," Tish said, with her eyes on him. "A bully as well as a slacker.
Never mind. She won't have to put up with him long. If I have any
influence in this community that youth will be drafted and sent to a mud
hole in France. Mark my words," she went on, settling her hat with a
jerk, "that boy will be registered as a single man before this day's
over. Go and start the engine, Lizzie. I daresay you remember that
much."

Seeing that she had a plan, and "ours not to reason why, ours but to do
and die," as Aggie frequently quotes, we went down to the street again.
I was even then vaguely apprehensive, an apprehension not without
reason, as it turned out. For, reaching over to start the engine, as
Tish had taught me by turning a lever on the dashboard and moving up a
throttle on the wheel, what was my horror to see the car moving slowly
off, with Aggie in the rear seat and as white as chalk.

Tish, in her patriotic fervor, had stopped the thing in gear.

I ran beside it, but was unable to get onto the running board. I then
saw Aggie, generally so timid, crawling over the back of the seat, and
called to her to put on the brake. She did so, but not until the car had
mounted the sidewalk and struck a policeman in the back.

This would not be worth recording, as there were no immediate results,
had it not been for the policeman. It brought us to his attention, and
came near to ruining Tish's plan. But of this later on.

I do not, even now, know just what arguments Tish used with Myrtle. Yes,
that was her name. We had a grea