The Scarlet Car; The Princess Aline

It's 1907, and the automobile is still a wondrous, temperamental beast. When Winthrop convinces Beatrice Forbes to take a road trip to the big football game in his scarlet car, he's plotting something more ambitious than mere spectating: he's plotting to steal her from her insufferable fiancé, Peabody. What follows is a romping adventure through early automotive America, where breakdowns become metaphors for stalled ambitions, detours force inconvenient intimacy, and every sputtering engine gives Winthrop another chance to play the hero Beatrice's stuffy fiancé clearly isn't. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous journalist of his day, writes with the brisk confidence of a man who covered wars and married beauties, and his prose crackles with period charm. This is a delightful time capsule of an era when a car ride constituted genuine adventure and winning the girl required actual ingenuity rather than text messages.