The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald [67]
"These aren't towns," said Gloria scornfully, "these are just city blocks plumped down coldly into waste acres. I imagine all the men here have their mustaches stained from drinking their coffee too quickly in the morning."
"And play pinochle on the commuting trains."
"What's pinochle?"
"Don't be so literal. How should I know? But it sounds as though they ought to play it."
"I like it. It sounds as if it were something where you sort of cracked your knuckles or something.... Let me drive."
Anthony looked at her suspiciously.
"You swear you're a good driver?"
"Since I was fourteen."
He stopped the car cautiously at the side of the road and they changed seats. Then with a horrible grinding noise the car was put in gear, Gloria adding an accompaniment of laughter which seemed to Anthony disquieting and in the worst possible taste.
"Here we go!" she yelled. "Whoo-oop!"
Their heads snapped back like marionettes on a single wire as the car leaped ahead and curved retchingly about a standing milk-wagon, whose driver stood up on his seat and bellowed after them. In the immemorial tradition of the road Anthony retorted with a few brief epigrams as to the grossness of the milk-delivering profession. He cut his remarks short, however, and turned to Gloria with the growing conviction that he had made a grave mistake in relinquishing control and that Gloria was a driver of many eccentricities and of infinite carelessness.
"Remember now!" he warned her nervously, "the man said we oughtn't to go over twenty miles an hour for the first five thousand miles."
She nodded briefly, but evidently intending to accomplish the prohibitive distance as quickly as possible, slightly increased her speed. A moment later he made another attempt.
"See that sign? Do you want to get us pinched?"
"Oh, for Heaven's sake," cried Gloria in exasperation, "you always exaggerate things so!"
"Well, I don't want to get arrested."
"Who's arresting you? You're so persistent—just like you were about my cough medicine last night."
"It was for your own good."
"Ha! I might as well be living with mama."
"What a thing to say to me!"
A standing policeman swerved into view, was hastily passed.
"See him?" demanded Anthony.
"Oh, you drive me crazy! He didn't arrest us, did he?"
"When he does it'll be too late," countered Anthony brilliantly.
Her reply was scornful, almost injured.
"Why, this old thing won't go over thirty-five."
"It isn't old."
"It is in spirit."
That afternoon the car joined the laundry-bags and Gloria's appetite as one of the trinity of contention. He warned her of railroad tracks; he pointed out approaching automobiles; finally he insisted on taking the wheel and a furious, insulted Gloria sat silently beside him between the towns of Larchmont and Rye.
But it was due to this furious silence of hers that the gray house materialized from its abstraction, for just beyond Rye he surrendered gloomily to it and re-relinquished the wheel. Mutely he beseeched her and Gloria, instantly cheered, vowed to be more careful. But because a discourteous street-car persisted callously in remaining upon its track Gloria ducked down a side-street—and thereafter that afternoon was never able to find her way back to the Post Road. The street they finally mistook for it lost its Post-Road aspect when it had gone five miles from Cos Cob. Its macadam became gravel, then dirt—moreover, it narrowed and developed a border of maple trees, through which filtered the weltering sun, making its endless experiments with shadow designs upon the long grass.
"We're lost now," complained Anthony.
"Read that sign!"
"Marietta—Five Miles. What's Marietta?"
"Never heard of it, but let's go on. We can't turn here and there's probably a detour back to the Post Road."
The way became scarred with deepening ruts and insidious shoulders of stone. Three farmhouses