She was rather startled by the intense searching that suddenly came into his steady eyes. His right hand was leaving the wheel and she wasn’t ready for this. She laughed gaily to break the tension, and finished her parable.
“I believe I had almost made you forget that we’re grown up. Things aren’t nearly so simple as when we lived in play-houses, are they?”
“Heavens, no,” he agreed, and went back to the wheel.
To hide the shock of the sudden contact with earth after his insane flight he turned his attention to the car, inquiring lightly:
“Shall we fly for a mile or two? There aren’t any speed laws here, nor many living things to run over. It’s one of the advantages of a place as wild as this, that you can do just as you like.”
So they raced against the wind, the girl looking ahead to catch the first glow of the city lights, and Billy staring blindly at the road and hearing the crying of the pines waiting for a house and warmth and light and life to shelter. He was beginning to accept the haunting suspicion that it wasn’t just the fear for the hard, lonely places that was responsible for the girl’s indifference, but that all his constant, ardent reaching out for her had failed absolutely to awaken anything deeper than a passing delight in being courted. Some unaccountable flash of disillusionment made him wonder if she was capable of anything
more than this weak, kittenlike playfulness, and as quickly he cursed himself for being an unchivalrous cad, and came to, with all his usual interest.
They were not strangers to the most select cafes in town, and they found a table in a corner close to a blazing fire, half screened from the crowd, but where a panel mirror reflected all the gaiety of the place. They made a very human little pantomime, these pleasure-seekers—over-made-up women with bloated, sated-looking men; gay young college crowds, glowing and noisy, trooping in from an afternoon on the ice; engaged couples making the most of one of the rare celebrations which the limits of their purses and the needs of the half-furnished nest would allow, and other less elated, but obviously more comfortable, men and women whom one could spot immediately as having left the baby with a grandmother and come here to snatch a respite from family ties, only to fly happily back to them again and ask, “After all what did we ever see to prize so much in what we called our liberty?”
At odd moments Billy found himself prospecting their cases in the light of his own ambitions; most of the time he was unconscious of any presence in the room other than the girl sitting opposite him. He was also proudly aware of other admiring glances in her direction. It was the same dazzling attraction that had made her so
popular at dances and house-parties almost before she was grown up. The wild rose color in her cheeks, the gold in her crinkling hair, the bits of just the right shade of an amethyst gown peeping out from her white furs, and the wonderful little hat that had evidently been the breast of a bird—all had their part in the effect. More compelling still were the wavering blue eyes with their little brown specks. They seemed very mysterious and bright and childishly troubled to-night, but that was because she was searching the crowd to see if there might be “anyone she knew.”