My Friend the Chauffeur
Book Excerpt
Can a saintly virgin on a golden panel look sulky? I'm not sure, but this virgin gave the effect of having been reluctantly torn from such a background, and she looked distinctly sulky, even angelically cross. She had not wanted to come into my garden, that was plain; and she lagged behind the others to gaze at a rose-bush, by way of a protest against the whole expedition. What she saw to disapprove of in me I was at a loss to guess, but that she did disapprove was evident. The dazzling brown eyes, with the afternoon sun glinting between their thick dark fringes, hated me for something;--was it my existence, or my advertisement? Then they wandered to Terry, and pitied, rather than spurned. "You poor, handsome, big fellow," they seemed so say, "so you are that miserable little man's chauffeur! You must be very unfortunate, or you would have found a better career. I'm so sorry for you."
"Do sit down, please," I said, lest after all it should occur t
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Readers reviews
Predictable, but charming. This romance-cum-travelogue covers the delights of an early 20th-century motorcar trip across Europe with six people, all of whom, mostly unknown to each other, are pretending to something different than what they really are: Sir Ralph, a British baronet who runs a Riviera newspaper; his friend Lord Terry Barrymore, an impoverished, Irish younger son; Mrs. Kidder, a wealthy American widow and her precocious daughter, Beechy, and convent-reared niece, Maida; and an opportunistic Austrian prince. The story is told in five segments, each narrated by a different character, and we get all the landscape they pass by along with the plot, as well as the various troubles that period motorists were vexed by. That we can figure out, pretty early on, what's going to happen next makes very little difference to the fun.
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