He seems to leave his body; it wafts off behind on a current of air, like a hat—and he is only a soul, a delicious kernel of soul ecstatically drunk, floating like an atom through the eternities.
"Faster," he says.
But he is aware now of a shrill, insistent, strident sound. It drills into his soul; it will not be quiet; it will not let him be. Bing! His body, catching up from behind, drops about him again—and then he knows. It is Dolly; Dolly screaming, poor little Dolly hysterical with fear.
"Slow up," he says to the chauffeur.
The world gradually changes from a mere blur of parallel lines to visible groupings of matter. Trees, houses, the road, the sky reappear as through a curtain torn before them. The chauffeur wipes his brow. "Ah, Monsieur!" he says.
And Dolly, very pale, says with an impatience that seems weary, as though it were repeating itself for the thousandth time "Oh, Goosie, why, why, why will you scare me so?"
Charles-Norton is penitent, but a bit morose. "Gee," he says; "that wasn't fast. That wasn't fast." His eyes go off, very far; a vague, vague yearning, covered over with layer and layer of resignation, palpitates faintly at the pit of his being. "You don't know what speeding is," he murmurs; "you don't know——"
The machine, at smooth half-speed, is returning toward the city. "I won't go with you again," says Dolly.
But she always does. She doesn't like to ride fast, and he does, but she never lets him ride alone. 'Cause she loves him!
He will have to be more careful now, however. The other evening, as they sat in the cozy reading-room (lined with editions de luxe) after the performance, she got upon his knee and, hiding his eyes with her hands so he could not look at her, whispered something in his ear.