"But are you quite sure you feel strong and well enough to drive the car yourself?" Lucinda misdoubted for perhaps the hundredth time, though for the first openly.
The woman on the bed gave her hand a small jerk of petulance. "Don't you worry your head about me, Mrs. Druce," she insisted. "I'll be all right. I can drive any make of car there is, and I know all the roads out of Los Angeles like a book. Why, when me and Lynn was living together, we didn't hardly ever have any use for a chauffeur."
"Where will you go, then?"
"Up North, I guess, by the Coastal Highway. I can make Santa Barbara by morning easy. But I don't know, maybe I might go right through to Frisco. That's where I want to get, you know. It ought to be easy to lie low in a town like Frisco. Anyhow, wherever I decide, I'll shoot you a wire first thing, telling you where I left the car. I only wish I didn't have to take it, somehow it don't seem right. But there! maybe I won't have to.... And unless I do, there wouldn't be any sense in my leaving all my clothes here and everything, would there? What time is it now? A person would think Mr. Druce wouldn't be much longer, wouldn't they? I suppose you wouldn't want to call up Lynn's house and ask...."
"I'd rather not."
"I kind of thought you'd feel like that about it. It would look too much like worrying about Lynn, wouldn't it?" Lucinda made no reply, and after a moment of dumb staring at the ceiling a shadow of complacency modified Nelly's fretful look. "I guess it's all over with Lynn now, as far as you're concerned, isn't it?"
"Yes," Lucinda said with the slowness that spells restraint—"as far as I'm concerned, it's all over."
"I'm awfully sorry," the girl asserted, her voice in turn carrying the colour of complacency—"I mean, sorry for you. You must've been awfully stuck on Lynn."
"Yes...." To offset a choke in her voice Lucinda added with a hard laugh: "Awfully!"
"It's terrible to have to give up a man like Lynn.... Don't I know!"