ON THE ROAD TO RIPLEY
and grassy down, lush meadows where shining rivers wound their lazy way, villages with square-towered, flint churches, and rambling, cheap, and hearty inns, clean white country towns, long downhill stretches where one might ride at one's ease (overlooking a jolt or so), and far away, at the end of it all,—the sea.
What mattered a fly or so in the dawn of these delights? Perhaps he had been dashed a minute by the shameful episode of the Young Lady in Grey, and perhaps the memory of it was making itself a lair in a corner of his brain from which it could distress him in the retrospect by suggesting that he looked like a fool; but for the present that trouble was altogether in abeyance. The man in drab—evidently a swell—had spoken to him as his equal, and the knees of his brown suit and the chequered stockings were ever before his eyes. (Or rather, you could see the stockings by carrying the head a little to one side.) And to feel little by little his mastery over this delightful, treacherous machine growing and growing!—Every half-mile or so his knees reasserted themselves, and he dismounted and sat awhile by the roadside.
It was at a charming rustic place between Esher and Cobham, where a bridge crosses a stream, that Mr. Hoopdriver came across the other cyclist in brown. It is well to notice the fact here, although the interview was of the slightest, because it happened that subsequently Hoopdriver saw a great deal more of this other man in brown. The other cyclist in brown had a machine of dazzling newness, and a punctured pneumatic lay across his knees. He was
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