I think she rather wavered when they brought the horse, which looked larger than usual and had a Roman nose. The instructor handed Tish four lines and she grabbed them nervously in a bunch.
"Just a moment!" said the instructor, and slipped a line between each two of her fingers.
Tish looked rather startled. "When I used to ride--" she began with dignity.
But the instructor only smiled. "These two are for the curb," he said--"if he bolts or anything like that, you know. Whoa, Viper! Still, old man!"
"Viper!" Tish repeated, clutching at the lines. "Is--is he--er--nasty?"
"Not a bit of it," said the instructor, while he prepared to hoist her up. "He's as gentle as a woman to the people he likes. His only fault is that he's apt to take a little nip out of the stablemen now and then. He's very fond of ladies."
"Humph!" said Tish. "He's looking at me rather strangely, don't you think? Has he been fed lately?"
"Perhaps he sees that divided skirt," I suggested.
Tish gave me one look and got on the horse. They walked round the ring at first and Tish seemed to like it. Then a stableman put a nickel into a player-piano and that seemed to be a signal for the thing to trot. Tish said afterward that she never hit the horse's back twice in the same place. Once, she says, she came down on his neck, and several times she was back somewhere about his tail. Every time she landed, wherever it might be, he gave a heave and sent her up again. She tried to say "Whoa," but it came out in pieces, so to speak, and the creature seemed to be encouraged by it and took to going faster. By that time, she said, she wasn't coming down at all, but was in the air all the time, with the horse coming up at the rate of fifty revolutions a second. She had presence of mind enough to keep her mouth shut so she wouldn't bite her tongue off.
After four times round the music stopped and the horse did also. They were just in front of us, and Tish looked rather dazed.
"You did splendidly!" said Aggie. "Honestly, Tish, I was frightened at first, but you and that dear horse seemed one piece. Didn't they, Lizzie?"
Tish straightened out the fingers of her left hand with her right and extricated the lines. Then she turned her head slowly from right to left to see if she could.