For a moment their eyes clashed in frank combat, hers angry and defiant, his adoring but determined.
"Listen here, Miss Bartlett," he urged. "The men wouldn't understand your coming out like this, at night, without your uniform. I told Cass I'd take care of you, and I'm going to do it."
"You mean that you will dare to stop me from getting out of my own car? Take your hand off that door instantly!"
She actually seized his big, strong fingers with her small gloved ones and tried to pull them away from the door. But Quin began to laugh, and in spite of herself she laughed back; and, while the two were childishly struggling for the possession of the door-handle, Captain Phipps all unnoticed passed out of the mess-hall, gave a few instructions to his waiting orderly, and disappeared in the darkness.
By the time they were on their way home, the moon, no longer dodging behind chimneys, had swaggered into the open. It was a hardened old highwayman of a moon, red in the face and very full, and it declared with every flashing beam that it was no respecter of persons, and that it intended doing all the mischief possible down there in the little world of men.
Miss Eleanor Bartlett was its first victim. In the white twilight she forgot the social gap that lay between her and the youth beside her. She ceased to observe the size and roughness of his hands, but noted instead the fine breadth of his shoulders. She concerned herself no longer with his verbal lapses, but responded instead to his glowing confidence that everybody was as sincere and well intentioned as himself. She discovered what the more sophisticated Rose had perceived at once—that Quinby Graham "had a way with him," a beguiling, sympathetic way that made one tell him things that one really didn't mean to tell any one. Of course, it was partly due to the fact that he asked such outrageously direct questions, questions that no one in her most intimate circle of friends would dare to ask. And the queer part of it was that she was answering them.
Before she realized it she was launched on a full recital of her woes, her thwarted ambition to go on the stage, her grandmother's tyranny, the indignity of being sent back to a school from which she had run away six months before. She flattered herself that she was stating her case for the sole purpose of getting an unprejudiced outsider's unbiased opinion; but from the inflection of her voice and the expressive play of eyes and lips it was evident that she was deriving some pleasure from the mere act of thus dramatizing her woes before that wholly sympathetic audience of one.
It was not until they reached the Eastern Parkway and were speeding toward the twinkling lights of the city that their little bubble of intimacy, blown in the moonlight, was shattered by a word.
"Say, Miss Eleanor," Quin blurted out unexpectedly, "do you like me?"