Sixty miles still to go. She was driving slightly under ‘thirty,’ but the minutes were racing by. She didn’t go any slower. Fifty miles. The roadster kept its pace, the meter staying around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, always between twenty-five and thirty. Forty miles; then half way. She didn’t cheat.... Stars, sage, warm wind, early evening.... A thoroughbred, always different.... What could possibly be spoiled, if two kept on and on like this? But she knew something; and others, he knew, certainly had spoiled it.... Twenty-five miles.
The night suddenly opened for him. He was nearer to her than ever before, though he had not changed position. He could not feel himself or her, but there was a white ball of light between his eyes—like all the stars of the gray haze fusing into one, like all the perfumes of the air fusing into one, all the stillnesses he had ever known fusing into one.
‘You—’ from her.
‘Yes, I’m here—’
‘You know something—I must know!’
‘You are something—I must be,’ he went on, as if finishing a magic formula which she had begun.
‘Oh, what has happened to us?’ she cried suddenly.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you suppose—the others—ever know anything like that—like this?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Elbert.