“A brilliant performance, sir.” “Thank you,” said Walter Mitty. Mitty.” “I’ve read your book on streptothricosis,” said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. In the operating room there were whispered introductions: “Dr. Wish you’d take a look at him.” “Glad to,” said Mitty. “We’re having the devil’s own time with McMillan, the millionaire banker and close personal friend of Roosevelt. He flew over.” A door opened down a long, cool corridor and Dr. Benbow, but there are two specialists here, Dr. “Yes?” said Walter Mitty, removing his gloves slowly. . “It’s the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan,” said the pretty nurse. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove past the hospital on his way to the parking lot. “Pick it up, brother!” snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and lurched ahead. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again. “Why don’t you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?” Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. “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.

Author of secret life of walter mitty