and shaky as
she stood on it. Besides, why was she trying, for the first time in her
life, to go Nan's pace, which had always been, and was now more than ever
before, too hot and mettlesome for her? She didn't know why; only that
Nan had been, somehow, all day setting the pace, daring her, as it were,
to make it. It was becoming, oddly, a point of honour between them, and
neither knew how or why.

3

On the road it was the same. Nan, with only the faintest, if any
application of brakes, would commit herself to lanes which leaped
precipitously downwards like mountain streams, zig-zagging like a
dog's-tooth pattern, shingled with loose stones, whose unseen end might
be a village round some sharp turn, or a cove by the sea, or a field path
running to a farm, or merely the foot of one hill and the beginning of
the steep pull up the next. Coast roads in Cornwall are like that--often
uncertain in their ultimate goal (for map-makers, like bicyclists, are
apt to get tired of them, and, tiring, break them off, so to speak, in
mid-air, leaving them suspended, like snapped ends of string). But
however uncertain their goal may be, their form is not uncertain at
all; it can be relied on to be that of a snake in agony leaping down a
hill or up; or, if one prefers it, that of a corkscrew plunging downwards
into a cork.

Nan leaped and plunged with them. She was at the bottom while the others
were still jolting, painfully brake-held, albeit rapidly, half-way down.
And sometimes, when the slope was more than usually like the steep roof
of a house, the zig-zags more than usually acute, the end even less than
usually known, the whole situation, in short, more dreadful and perilous,
if possible, than usual, the others surrendered, got off and walked. They
couldn't really rely on their brakes to hold them, supposing something
should swing round on them from behind one of the corners; they couldn't
be sure of turning with the road when it turned at its acutest, and such
failure of harmony with one's road is apt to meet with a dreadful
retribution. Barry was adventurous, and Kay and Gerda were calm, but to
all of them life was sweet and limbs and bicycles precious; none of them
desired an untimely end.

But Nan laughed at their prognostications of such an end. "It will be
found impossible to ride down these hills," said their road book, and Nan
laughed at that too. You can, as she observed, ride down anything; it is
riding up that is