"That's thirty miles away!" said Sylvia, "and it's past five now."
"I'll have you there and back long before seven," asserted Molly. "Come on … come on …" She pulled impatiently, petulantly at the other girl's arm.
"I'm not invited, I suppose," said Morrison, lighting a cigarette with care.
Molly looked at him a little wildly. "No, Felix, you're not invited!" she said, and laughed unsteadily.
She had hurried them along to the car, and now they stood by the swift gray machine, Molly's own, the one she claimed to love more than anything else in the world. She sprang in and motioned Sylvia to the seat beside her.
"Hats?" suggested Morrison, looking at their bare, shining heads. He was evidently fighting for time, manoeuvering for an opening. His success was that of a man gesticulating against a gale. Molly's baldly unscrupulous determination beat down the beginnings of his carefully composed opposition before he could frame one of his well-balanced sentences. "No—no—it takes too long to go and get hats!" she cried peremptorily. "If you can't have what you want when you want it, it's no use having it at all!"
"I'm not sure," remarked Morrison, "that Miss Marshall wants this at all."
"Yes, she does; yes, she does!" Molly contradicted him heatedly. Sylvia, hanging undecided at the step, felt herself pulled into the car; the door banged, the engine started with a smooth sound of powerful machinery, the car leaped forward. Sylvia cast one backward glance at Morrison, an annoyed, distinguished, futile presence, standing motionless, and almost instantly disappearing in the distance in which first he, and then the house and tall poplars over it, shrank to nothingness.
Their speed was dizzying. The blazing summer air blew hot and vital in their faces; their hair tugged at the pins and flew back in fluttering strands; their thin garments clung to their limbs, molded as closely by the compressing wind as by water. Molly did not turn her eyes from the road ahead, leaping up to meet them, and vanishing under the car. She tried to make a little casual talk: "Don't you love to let it out, give it all the gas there is?" "There's nothing like a quick spin for driving the nightmares out of your mind, is there?" But as Sylvia made no answer to these overtures (the plain fact was that Sylvia had no breath for speech,—for anything but a horrified fascinated glare at the road), she said suddenly, somberly, "If I were you, I certainly should despise me!" She took the car around a sharp curve on two wheels.
Sylvia clutched at the side and asked wonderingly, "Why in the world?" in a tone so permeated with sincerity that even Molly felt it.