Their speed was dizzying.  The blazing summer air blew hot and vital in their faces; their hair tugged at the pins and flew back in fluttering strands; their thin garments clung to their limbs, molded as closely by the compressing wind as by water.  Molly did not turn her eyes from the road ahead, leaping up to meet them, and vanishing under the car.  She tried to make a little casual talk:  “Don’t you love to let it out, give it all the gas there is?” “There’s nothing like a quick spin for driving the nightmares out of your mind, is there?” But as Sylvia made no answer to these overtures (the plain fact was that Sylvia had no breath for speech,—­for anything but a horrified fascinated glare at the road), she said suddenly, somberly, “If I were you, I certainly should despise me!” She took the car around a sharp curve on two wheels.

Sylvia clutched at the side and asked wonderingly, “Why in the world?” in a tone so permeated with sincerity that even Molly felt it.

“Don’t you know?” she cried.  “Do you mean to say you don’t know?”

“Know what?” asked Sylvia.  Hypnotized by the driver’s intent and unwavering gaze on the road, she kept her own eyes as fiercely concentrated, her attention leaping from one quickly seen, instantly disappearing detail to another,—­a pile of gravel here,—­a half-buried rock there.—­They both raised their voices to be heard above the sound of the engine and the rush of the car.  “Know what?” repeated Sylvia loudly.

“Why do you suppose I made myself ridiculous by pulling you away from Felix that idiotic, humiliating way!” Molly threw this inquiry out, straight before her, angrily.  The wind caught at her words and hurled them behind.

In a flash Sylvia understood something to which she had been resolutely closing her perceptions.  She felt sick and scared.  She clutched the side, watched a hill rise up steep before them and flatten out under the forward leap of the car.  She thought hard.  Something of her little-girl, overmastering horror of things, rough, outspoken, disagreeable, swept over her.  She violently wished that she could escape from the conversation before her.  She would have paid almost any price to escape.

But Molly’s nerves were not so sensitive.  She evidently had no desire to escape or to let Sylvia.  The grim little figure at the steering-wheel controlled with her small hands the fate of the two.  She broke out now, impatient at Sylvia’s silence:  “Any fool could see that it was because I couldn’t bear to see you with Felix another minute, and because I hadn’t any other way to get you apart.  Everybody else there knew why.  I knew they knew.  But I couldn’t help it.  I couldn’t bear it another instant!”

She broke the glass of decent reticence with a great clattering blow.  It shivered into fragments.  There was nothing now between them but the real issue in all its uncomely bareness.  This real issue, the maenad at the wheel now held up before them in a single brutal statement—­“Are you in love with Felix?  I am.”