“You’re not a young man any longer.” He raced the engine a little. “We’ve been all through that,” she said, getting out of the car. “Remember to get those overshoes while I’m having my hair done,” she said.

Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to have her hair done. You were up to fifty-five.” Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind. “You know I don’t like to go more than forty. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. “Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs. “The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!” . . . “The Old Man’ll get us through,” they said to one another. 3 turret!” The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned.

He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window.

“Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!” The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa- pocketa-pocketa. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We’re going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking.

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