"You are responsible for all of it, then," she cried recklessly. "You had not the slightest excuse for making me drink all that nasty, burning stuff!"
Regardless of his wheel, Antony turned and stared at her, and only her shriek of terror saved them from the stone wall that bordered a curve in the road.
"You mean you were----"
"If you dare to say it I shall jump!" she interrupted, plucking nervously at her skirt, and he saw that she was quite capable of carrying out the threat. 47
"But--but you drank it yourself--I thought you knew----" he stammered.
"It was down in my throat--I couldn't help it--I pushed it away as soon as I could--I never tasted anything but champagne and sherry and I thought they were all the same, those things. . ."
She was on the point of tears now, and even in his keen sense of danger Antony was conscious of a gratified consciousness of that calm masculine superiority so long denied him.
"I see, I see," he said hastily. "I am very sorry. I did the best I could at the time: I am not accustomed to resuscitating fainting young ladies and I rather lost my head. I assure you that I assume all the blame."
"I think you had better," she replied vindictively, and Antony's conscious magnanimity collapsed instantly into an intense irritation.
"I must beg you to observe," he said, somewhat jerkily, as they bounced up and down the irregularities of a rough country road, "that I am hardly responsible, even with the best will in the world, for your inability to consume five or six swallows of bad whisky without--without----" in a panic of terror as her hands flew to her skirts and her knees stiffened, he concluded 48 impotently, "oh, have it any way you like! It's all my fault. Now, for heaven's sake, sit still and listen to me. Do you or do you not know anything whatever about motor cars? I ask because it is absolutely necessary," he added hastily.