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."

There was something eerie, terrifying, in her casting these words
out, straight before her. Sylvia looked in awe at the pale, pinched
profile, almost unrecognizable in its stern misery. "Because if you're
not," Molly went on, her white lower lip twitching, "I wish you'd keep
out. It was all right before you came with your horrible cleverness.
It was all right. It was all right."

Through the iteration of this statement, through the tumult of her own
thoughts, through the mad rush of the wind past her ears, Sylvia heard
as clearly as though she sat again in the great, dim, quiet room, a
melodious voice saying gently, indulgently, laughingly, "_Molly!_"
Secure in her own safe place of favor she felt a great wave of
generous pity for the helpless self-deception of her sister-woman.
Fired by this and by the sudden perception of an opening for an act of
spectacular magnanimity--would it be any the less magnanimous because
it would cost her nothing in the end?--she reached for the mantle of
the _beau role_ and cast it about her shoulders. "Why, Molly dear!"
she cried, and her quick sympathies had never been more genuinely
aroused, "Molly dear, of course I'll keep out, if you want me to. I'll
leave the coast clear to you as long as you please."

She was almost thrown from the seat by the jarring grind of the car
brought to a sudden standstill. Molly caught her hands, looked into
her face, the first time their eyes had met. "Do you mean it ...
Sylvia?"

Sylvia nodded, much agitated, touched by the other's pain, hal