She slid off the coping of the bridge, and she seemed somehow set free in the strength of her small body laughter-real and swashbuckling, as he had heard it the night before-had got out of its prison, too.
"I say! We'll never get those cigarettes if we don't hurry… I feel the way you talk. D'you want to run for it? But take it easy; it's a quarter of a mile."
Rampole said, "What ho!" and they clipped out past the hayricks with the wind in their faces, and Dorothy Starberth was still laughing.
"I hope I meet Mrs. Colonel Granby," she said, breathlessy. She seemed to think this a wicked idea, and turned a flushed face over her shoulder, eyes dancing. "It's nice, it's nice.- Ugh! I'm glad I have on low-heeled shoes."
"Want to speed it up?"
"Beast! I'm warm already. I say, are you a track man?" "Hmf. A little."
A little. Through his brain ran white letters on black boards, in a dusky room off the campus, where there were silver cups in glass cases and embalmed footballs with dates painted on them. Then, with the road flying past, he remembered another scene of just such an exhilaration as he felt now. November, with a surf of sound beating, the rasp of breathing, and the quarterback declaiming signals like a ham actor. Thick headache. Little wires in his legs drawn tight, and cold fingers without feeling in them. Then the wheeze and buckle of the line, and thuds. Suddenly the cold air streaming in his face, a sensation of flying over white lines on legs wired like a puppet's, and a muddy object he plucked out of the air just under the goal-posts… He heard again that stupefying roar, and felt his stomach opening and shutting as the roar lifted the dusky air like a lid off a kettle. That had been only last autumn, and it seemed a thousand years ago. Here he was on a weirder adventure in the twilight, with a girl whose very presence was like the tingle of those lost, roaring thousand years.
"A little," he repeated, suddenly, drawing a deep breath.
They were into the outskirts of the village, where thick waisted trees shaded white shop-fronts, and the bricks of the sidewalks ran in crooked patterns like a child's writing exercise. A woman stopped to look at them. A man on a bicycle goggled so much that he ran into the ditch and swore.
Leaning up against a tree, flushed and panting, Dorothy laughed.