"Get out, Dick. Climb in back. This little girl's going in front with me." The dominating voice made the words like an irresistible force. Not until she was sitting beside him and a docile young man had wedged himself into the crowded space behind, did it occur to her to question it.
"Do you always boss people like that?"
They were racing smoothly down a slope, and his answer came through the rushing of the wind past her ears. "Always." The gleam of a headlight passed across his face and she saw it keen, alert, intensely alive. "Ask, and you'll have to argue. Command, and people jump. It's the man that orders what he wants that gets it. Philosophy taught in ten lessons," he added in a contemptuous undertone. "Well, little girl, you haven't been forgetting me, have you?"
She disregarded the change of tone. His idea had struck her as extraordinarily true. It had never occurred to her. She turned it over in her mind.
"A girl ought to be able to work it, too," she said.
He laughed.
"Maybe. She finds it easier to work a man."
"I'm too polite to agree that all of you are soft things."
"You're too clever to find any of us hard to handle."
"Yes? Isn't it too bad putty is so uninteresting?"