y dust or any wind (I don't know what harm he
thought the wind would do her). Instead of taking her out he would spend
hours in the garage standing still and looking at her, stooping sometimes
to examine her for a spot or a crack on her enamel, but always with
reverence. I believe he never touched her without washing his hands
first.

We had been at Amershott a week and we hadn't been out in that car three
times, though the weather was perfect. Jimmy never could see that it was
perfect enough. If it hadn't rained for two days he was afraid of dust;
if it did rain he was afraid of mud; what he wanted was one light shower
to lay the dust; and when he got it he was afraid of another shower
coming. And on hot days he was afraid the sun might do something. And he
was afraid of _us_ all the time lest we should ask him to take the car
out on a day that wouldn't do.

I do not know how or why he had come to look on that car as his god. It
wasn't, I do believe that it wasn't, because the thing was valuable,
because he had sunk so much capital in that body and those engines (he
had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy). There was a
sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint
of grossness. It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering
beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the
remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of
his intemperance in motoring. He had evidently said to himself:
"Motor-cars are perishable things. I did for my first beloved by my
excesses. Rather than knock this divinity about I will abstain from
motoring." And the cab-proprietor of Midhurst must have made a fortune
out of Jimmy's abstinence.

The odd thing was that Charlie Thesiger respected it. (He too had come
down for the last fortnight in July.) He was the only one of us who
didn't protest, didn't clamour, didn't try to reason or to laugh Jimmy
out of his insanity. And he went further. He refused to enter the car, to
be taken in it on the few suitable days when Jimmy allowed it to go out.
It was as if he were dominated by some scruple as morbid as his host's
passion. We couldn't account for it at the time, for he liked motoring
excessively, and he couldn't afford it.

I've wondered since whether this wasn't the way Charlie settled with
his conscience, his own sacrifice to decency. He could eat Jimmy's bread
and drink his wine and stay for weeks