So did I, but I didn’t mean to let her know that.
“I’m going out,” she went on. “If I don’t, I shall have a fit.”
“Out!” I repeated. “You can’t. It’s midnight.”
“Can’t? There’s no such word for me as ‘can’t,’ when I want to do anything, and you ought to know that,” said she. “It’s only being ill that ever stops me, and I’m not ill to-night. I feel as if electricity were flowing all through me, making my nerves jump, and I believe you feel exactly the same way. Your eyes are as big as half-crowns, and as black as ink.”
“I am a little nervous,” I confessed. And I couldn’t help thinking it odd that Lisa and I should both be feeling that electrical sensation at the same time. “Perhaps it’s in the air. Maybe there’s going to be a thunder-storm. There are clouds over the stars, and a wind coming up.”
“Maybe it’s partly that, maybe not,” said she. “But there’s one thing I’m sure of. Something’s going to happen.”
“Do you feel that, too?” I broke out before I’d stopped to think. Then I wished I hadn’t. But it was too late to wish. Lisa caught me up quickly.
“Ah, I knew you did!” she cried, looking as eerie and almost as haggard as a witch. “Something is going to happen. Come. Go with me and be in it, whatever it is.”
“No,” I said. “And you mustn’t go either.” But she was weird. She seemed to lure me, like a strange little siren, with all a siren’s witchery, though without her beauty. My voice sounded undecided, and I knew it.
“Of course I’m not asking you to wander with me in the night, hand in hand through the streets of Paris, like the Two Orphans,” said Lisa. “I’m going to have a closed carriage—a motor-brougham, one belonging to the hotel, so it’s quite safe. It’s ordered already, and I shall first drive and drive until my nerves stop jerking and my head throbbing. If you won’t drive with me I shall drive alone. But there’ll be no harm in it, either way. I didn’t know you were so conventional as to think there could be. Where’s your brave, independent American spirit?”