“Where are you going?” Jerry cried, hanging her head farther out of the window.
“Where are we going?” Joy repeated, as he hesitated.
“Down the Shore Road a ways!” he answered finally, and Jerry’s face disappeared.
“Hang Jerry—she acts like a regular old chaperone,” he grumbled as he helped her in the car.
“According to what you think of me, I need one,” she retorted. They were well under way before he replied, in a cool, even tone:
“Pretty crude, Joy—that’s not like you. I suppose Holy Boy Grant has been spilling a lot of chatter in your shell-pink ear.”
“Then you did say something to him! Packy—how could you do such a thing!”
The small, pitiful voice evoked a quick glance from him. “How couldn’t I, you’d better say. May I remark in passing that he certainly didn’t leave the ground long untrampled. Came up late last night, did he? I had to nurse myself along a bit before I staggered about and got under way.”
A mile flashed by them while Joy thought desperately: His profile bent over the wheel looked hard and even cruel. He had admitted talking to Grant as calmly as he would have admitted sending her a box of candy. He seemed to be in a repressed state below the level of which anything might be lurking.
“I—I want to know—just what you told him,” she said at last, after coining and discarding many different methods of putting the question.