Mitzie let the car jog listlessly to a stop. Phil was dimly aware that they were parking in a bumpy, blind end driveway in a neglected, shrubby square with tall buildings set around. He leaned back, smiling drowsily, his fingers playing with Lucky's springy fur. He was waiting complacently for Mitzie's sobs.
Instead, the seat jounced and the door of the jeep slammed.
He looked around. Mitzie was standing outside the jeep against a shadowy background of tangled shrubbery and misty, silent skyscrapers.
Suddenly she leaned forward toward him, bracing herself against the door with stiff arms. She inhaled gustily and her small, tender breasts lifted in their black satin half cups.
Now, he told himself, it must happen. She must yield, sobbing, to Lucky's power.
"I hate you, Phil," she said intensely. "You want to see me turn to jelly." New tears spurted from the inside corners of her eyes, but her expression grew fiercer. "Carstairs, Llewellyn and Buck may have tried to kill me, but at least they gave me a chance to be something. They allowed me the dignity of being hated. They didn't try to drown me in slop.
"I want glory," she went on in a voice that certainly should have sounded choked except she simply wouldn't permit it. "I want my kind of glory, no matter how cheap and selfish you think it is, because it's the only thing that's shining and brave in a shoddy, cowardly world. I want to spit in the world's eye and then face it, when it comes bleating for revenge, like I faced this jeep."
"I did think you were courageous there," Phil temporized, wondering why the devil Lucky's power, that had softened twenty men at a crack, was so slow in taking effect on a single misguided girl.
"Spare me any praise that's a cover for slop," Mitzie said scathingly. "Oh I know what that Sunday school beast there on your lap can do, and I know what you want to see happen. I have only one thing that's titanium in me, all the rest is stinking mush. You want to see that one thing break. No, worse, you want to see it soften. Well, I'm not going to let that happen." She stood up and took her hands off the door.
Suddenly Phil felt a kind of sleepy worry. He ran his hand over Lucky's fur, then shook him hesitatingly. "Wake up," he said uneasily.