The Reproof Courteous

For the few minutes it took the red roadster to slip under the green
summits of Twin Peaks and by a maze of boulevards debouch at length upon
Valencia and so into the busy length of Market Street their talk ran to
commonplaces. Thompson placed himself unreservedly in Sophie's hands. He
had to reach an express office on lower Market, get his things, and
proceed thence to the house where he had roomed all winter. Since it
suited Miss Carr's book to convey him to the first point, he accepted
the gift of her company gladly. So in the fullness of time they came
into the downtown press of traffic, among which, he observed, Sophie
steered her machine like a veteran.

At Third and Market the traffic whistle blocked them with the front
wheels over the safety line that guided the flow of cross-street
pedestrians, and the point man, crabbed perhaps from a long trick amidst
that roaring maze of vehicles, motioned autocratically for her to back
up.

Sophie muttered impatiently under her breath and went into reverse.
Behind her the traffic was piling up, each machine stealing every inch
of vantage for the go-ahead signal, crowding up wheel to wheel, the nose
of one thrusting at the rear fender of the other. On one side of Sophie
rose the base of a safety station for street-car boarders. Between her
car and the curb a long-snouted gray touring-car was edging in. And as
she backed under the imperative command of the traffic officer, one rear
hub clinked against the hind fender of the other, jarring both cars a
little, dinting the gray one's fender, marring the glossy finish.