As the car stood outside taking on gas, a man flapped up, spelled out
the New York license, looked at Claire and her father, and inquired,
"Quite a ways from home, aren't you?"
This time Claire did not say "Yes!" She experimented with, "Yes, quite a
ways."
"Well, hope you have a good trip. Good luck!"
Claire leaned her head on her hand, thought hard. "It's I who wasn't
friendly," she propounded to her father. "How much I've been losing.
Though I still refuse to like that coffee!"
She noticed the sign on the air-hose of the garage--"Free Air."
"There's our motto for the pilgrimage!" she cried.
She knew the exaltation of starting out in the fresh morning for places
she had never seen, without the bond of having to return at night.
Thus Claire's second voyage into democracy.
While she was starting the young man who had pulled her out of the mud
and given her lunch was folding up the tarpaulin and blankets on which
he had slept beside his Teal bug, in the woods three miles north of
Gopher Prairie. To the high-well-born cat, Vere de Vere, Milt Daggett
mused aloud, "Your ladyship, as Shakespeare says, the man that gets cold
feet never wins the girl. And I'm scared, cat, clean scared."