The question surprised him. “No, I never had another seat on my wheel. Why?”
“Oh, nothing.” She was very indifferent now. “I don’t think that I approve of girls on motorcycles. Go on,” she urged. “You were telling about taking girls to dances. Where else did you take them?”
He thought a moment. “Sometimes I took them to Vivian’s and had ice cream or took them to a motion picture show.”
“Oh, what fun.” Virginia was thinking aloud.
“What?” he asked.
She very calmly disregarded his question. “You haven’t told me how I am different,” she relentlessly persisted. “Please do.”
“It was the way we met, I suppose–the way I saw you first,” he confessed, fighting back his embarrassment.
“Tell me about it, Joe,” she pleaded softly.
“I was regaining consciousness after the accident. My whole body was a great pain. I was trying to understand what had happened.” He hesitated and then went on. “I opened my eyes. For an instant everything was blurred and indistinct. Things were whirling about in mists and billowy clouds. They rolled apart and through them, constantly growing clearer, came your face.” He was almost whispering now. “You looked too beautiful for this world and I believed that I was dead.” A little smile like a wavelet before a summer’s zephyr swept over his face. “You are a girl from the clouds to me,” he said gently.
A very flushed Virginia leaned towards him. A great tenderness for this big fellow held her, and for a moment she could not trust herself to speak. She reached for his hand and held it in her own. “I must go,” she murmured, as if driven away by her own timidity, and then, giving him a smile of ineffable sweetness, she left him.