The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley — Read

The car was the same two-seater Mercia that had carried Miss Trant so bravely out of Hitherton four days before. It was not perhaps the same Elizabeth Trant, certainly not the one Hitherton had known. She had been running about, discovering England, all by herself; marching into hotels and demanding beds and breakfasts and dinners and lunches; talking about roads and cars and cathedrals to strangers, mostly men. This was something. Indeed, after you had lived with the Colonel for twenty years at Hitherton, it was a great deal, a wild rush of independent life. But it was nothing -- mere touristry -- compared with her other adventures. The little car had taken her farther than the most distant cathedral, the loneliest hotel. It had plumped her into the middle of other people's lives, the most fantastic places in the world. She had not forsworn her allegiance to the historical romance -- and had read two out of the four she carried with her -- but now she regarded its figures with a different eye, meeting its conspirators and dragoons on something like terms of equality. Indeed, she could afford to pity them, for though they had to grapple with all the urgencies of life they appeared to have been denied all but a crumb or so from its vast stores of comic relief. She was beginning to feel now that she knew both. After the first splendid hour or two of escape, Monday had not been an exciting day. Ely, she found, was just fifteen miles too far, so she stayed that night in Cambridge -- a town she had visited before -- at The Lion in Petty Cury. Term had not yet begun and the little grey town, which she remembered as a riot of rowing enthusiasts, salmon mayonnaise, ices, and lawns lit with Chinese lanterns, was now pleasantly empty, only engaged in decking out its windows with a new stock of caps and gowns and college ties and tobacco jars. She had a little stroll before dinner, ate heartily, then sipped her coffee in the glass-covered lounge, which pleased her because it reminded her of being on board ship. By this time, she was eager to talk to somebody, and did her best with her neighbour, a large upholstered sort of woman who stared straight in front of her, above a magnificent Roman nose.

"I find it more tiring than I thought it would be, driving by oneself, I mean," explained Miss Trant.