Page:T.M. Royal Highness.djvu/285

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IMMA
269

apprentices, perhaps technical students or budding foresters, to judge by certain signs; maybe they belonged to the agricultural college; at any rate stout fellows enough, though rather rough, with sound careers before them. But that little untidy thing who strolled past looked like a factory hand or dressmaker's assistant. Girls like her' always had a young man in their own class, who took them out to tea in the parks on Sundays. And they exchanged what they knew about people in general, discussed them like connoisseurs, and felt that this pastime brought them closer together than any amount of riding or lawn-tennis.

As for the motor drive, Imma Spoelmann in the course of it explained that she had only invited Klaus Heinrich to it so as to let him see the chauffeur, a young American in brown leather, who, she declared, resembled the Prince. Klaus Heinrich objected with a smile that the back of the driver's neck did not enable him to express an opinion on the matter, and asked the Countess to say what she thought. She, after long denying the likeness in polite embarrassment, at last, on Imma's insistence, with a side glance at Klaus Heinrich, agreed to it.

Then Miss Spoelmann said that the grave, sober, and skilful youth had originally been in her father's personal service, driving him daily from Fifth Avenue to Broadway and back. Mr. Spoelmann, however, had insisted on extraordinary speed, like that of an express train, and the intense strain put upon a driver by such speed in the crowded streets of New York had proved at last too much for the youth. As a matter of fact no accident had happened; the young man had stuck to it and done his deadly duty with amazing care. But in the end it had often happened that he had had to be lifted down in a faint from his seat at the end of a run—a proof of the inordinate strain to which he had been daily subjected. To avoid having to dismiss him, Mr. Spoelmann had made him his daughter's