"Do you think--" Priscilla hesitated, and looked at him. Her bicycle
immediately hesitated too, and swerving across the road taught her it
would have nothing looked at except its handles. "Do you think," she
went on, after she had got herself straight again, "that the way I'm
going to live now will make me want to do it often?"
"Heaven forbid, ma'am. You are now going to live a most noble
life--the only fitting life for the thoughtful and the earnest. It
will be, once you are settled, far more sheltered from contact with
that which stirs ignoble impulses than anything your Grand Ducal
Highness has hitherto known."
"If you mean policemen by things that stir ignoble impulses," said
Priscilla, "I was sheltered enough from them before. Why, I never
spoke to one. Much less"--she shuddered--"much less ever touched one."
"Ma'am, you do not repent?"
"Heavens, no," said Priscilla, pressing onward.
Outside Ruehl, about a hundred yards before its houses begin, there is
a pond by the wayside. Into this, after waiting a moment peering up
and down the dark road to see whether anybody was looking, Fritzing
hurled the bicycles.
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