The car purred with the contentment of a great house-cat and lapped up the glimmering road like a stream of milk.
Sheila felt the spirit of the night, and felt that all the universe was in tender rapport with itself. She felt as never before the grace of love, the desire, the need of love. For years she had been exerting herself for her ambition, and now her ambition was tired. The hour of womanhood was striking, almost silently, yet as unmistakably as the distant town clock that published midnight, so far away as to be less overheard than felt in the slow throb of the air.
Bret Winfield’s response to the mood of the night was pagan. Sheila was a mighty nice girl and darned pretty and she had consented to take a midnight spin with him. But many darned pretty girls had done the same. A six-cylinder motor-car is a very winsome form of invitation.
In place of inviting a young man to a cozy corner in a parlor or a hammock on a piazza, the enterprising maiden of the day accepts his invitation—and seats herself in a flying hammock. Seclusion is secured and concealment attained by way of velocity.
A wonderful change had taken place in the world of lovers in the last ten years. For thousands of years before—ever since, indeed, the first man invented the taming of the first horse and took his cave-girl buggy-riding on a pair of poles or in a square-wheeled cart—lovers had been kept to about the same pace. Suddenly they were given a buggy that can go sixty miles an hour or better; so fast, indeed, that it is veiled in its own speed and its own dust. Even the naughty gods and the goddesses of Homer never knew any concealment like it.
Winfield was an average young man who had known average young women averagely well. He had found that demoiselles either would not motor with him at all or, motoring with him, expected to be paid certain gallant attentions. He always tried to live up to their expectations. They might struggle, but never fiercely enough to endanger the steering-wheel. They might protest, but never loudly enough to drown the engine.
Such was his experience with the laity. Sheila was his first actress, not including a few encounters with those camp-followers of the theater who are only accepted as “actresses” when they are arrested, and who have as much right to the name as washwomen for a convent have the right to be called “nuns,” when they drink too much.
But Winfield had reasoned that if the generality of pretty girls who motored with men were prepared for dalliance, by so much more would an actress be. Consequently, when he reached a hilltop where there was a good excuse for pausing to admire the view of a moon-plated river laid along a dark valley, he shut off the power and slid his left arm back of Sheila.
She sat forward promptly and his heart began to chug.
Making love is an old and foolish game, but strangely exciting at the time. Winfield was more afraid to withdraw his arm than to complete the embrace.