"Then let's just keep going and never get there. Do you know what I thought you meant the other night when you said we'd go to the beach?"
"No, what?" He was interested.
She told him. This was safer ground, and she enlarged her mental picture of the still, moonlit beach, the white breakers foaming along the shore, the salt wind, and the darkness, and the car plunging down a long white boulevard.
"Do you mean to tell me you'd never been to the beach resorts before?"
"Isn't it funny?" she laughed.
"You're a damn game little kid."
She found that the words pleased her more than anything he had yet said.
They sped on in silence. Helen found occupation enough in the sheer delight of going so swiftly through a blur of light and darkness toward an unknown end. She did not resist the fascination of the man beside her; there was exhilaration in his being there, security in his necessary attention to handling the big machine. They passed the park gates, and the car leaped like a live thing at the touch of a whip, plunging faster down the smooth road between dark masses of shrubbery. A clean, moist odor of the forest mixed with a salt tang in the air, and the headlights were like funnels of light cutting into the solid night a space for them to pass.
"Isn't it wonderful!" Helen sighed, and despised the inadequacy of the word.
"I like the bright lights better myself." After a pause, he added, "Country bred, aren't you?" His inflection was not a question.