“Oh, I can’t bear to think of that! I don’t want to lose my beautiful car! What can we do?”
“I don’t see anything to do but to sit here in the car all night, and of course we can’t do that. Nor can one of us go and one stay, for I wouldn’t let you go alone, and I’m sure I wouldn’t let you stay here alone.”
“I think I’ll go,” said Patty, slowly. “You stay with the car, and I’ll walk home alone. It’s only three miles, and I’m sure it’s perfectly safe; there’s no one abroad at this time of night.”
“Patty, I can’t let you do it;” and Philip Van Reypen looked deeply troubled. “I can’t let you walk those three miles, alone, late at night.”
“But you don’t want to go and leave me here, sitting alone in a broken-down motor car?”
“No; I can’t do that, either.”
“And we can’t both go,—and we can’t both stay! So it’s a dead—what do you call those things?”
“A deadlock?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean. If neither of us can go, and neither of us can stay, and we can’t both go, and we can’t both stay, isn’t that a pretty good imitation of a deadlock?”
“It certainly is! Now, in those lovely motor car novels that people write, somebody would come along just in the nick of time, and fix everything all right, and we’d all live happy ever after.”