“Drive on, please,” she said.
“There’s no danger,” said Vernon reassuringly, clucking at his horse, and the beast flung up its head in a spasmodic burst of speed, as livery-stable horses will. The horse did not have to trot very far to bear them away from the crack of the golf-balls and the dull subterranean echoes of the miners’ blasts, but Vernon felt that a cloud had floated all at once over this first spring day. The woman sitting there beside him seemed to withdraw herself to an infinite distance.
“You love the country?” he asked, feeling the need of speech.
“Yes,” she said, but she went no farther.
“And you once lived there?”
“Yes,” she said again, but she vouchsafed no more. Vernon found a deep curiosity springing within him; he longed to know more about this young woman who in all outward ways seemed to be just like the women he knew, and yet was so essentially different from them. But though he tried, he could not move her to speak of her own life or its affairs. At the last he said boldly:
“Tell me, how did you come to be a lawyer?”
Miss Greene turned to meet his inquisitive gaze.
“How did you?” she asked.
Vernon cracked his whip at the road.