“It isn’t the husband I object to—it is their cold-blooded scheme to go out and pick one up. Woman should be sought—”
“Well, when Eveley gets a car she’ll be sought fast enough,” said Kitty shrewdly. “She hasn’t suffered from any lack of admirers as it is, but when she goes motoring on her own—ach, Louie.”
“Then you approve of the car, do you, Nolan?”
“Well, since I can not think of any quicker or pleasanter way of spending the money,” he said slowly, “I may say that I do, unequivocally.”
“Why unequivocally?”
“What’s it mean, anyhow?” demanded Kitty.
“Can’t you talk English, Nolan?” asked Eveley, in some exasperation. “You started off as if you were in favor, but now heaven only knows what you mean.”
“Get your car, my poor child, by all means. Get your car. But a dictionary is what you really need.”
The rest of the evening they were enthusiastic almost to the point of incoherency. Kitty was in raptures over an exquisite red racer she had seen on the street. Miriam described Mary Pickford’s rose-upholstered car, and applied it to Eveley’s features. Nolan developed a surprisingly intimate knowledge of carburetors, horse-powers and cylinders.
When at last they braved the rustic stairway, homeward bound, with exclamatory gasps and squeals, gradually drifting away into silence, Eveley sat down on the floor to take off her shoes—a most childish habit carried over into the years of age and wisdom—and was immediately wrapped in happy thoughts where stunning motor clothes and whirring engines and Nolan’s pleasant eyes were harmoniously mingled. And when at last she started up into active consciousness again, and rushed pellmell to bed, mindful of her responsibility as a business girl, sleep came very slowly. And when it came at last, it was a chaotic jumble of excited dreams and tossings.