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, half ashamed of her own apparent generosity which was to mean no loss to her, no gain to Molly.  In the sudden becalmed stillness of the hot afternoon their bright, blown hair fell about their faces in shining clouds.

“I didn’t understand before,” said Sylvia; and she was speaking the truth.

“And you’ll let him alone?  You won’t talk to him—­play his accompaniments—­oh, those long talks of yours!”

“We’ve been talking, you silly dear, of the Renaissance compared to the Twentieth Century, and of the passing of the leisure class, and all the beauty they always create,” said Sylvia.  Again she spoke the literal truth.  But the true truth, burning on Molly’s tongue, shriveled this to ashes.  “You’ve been making him admire you, be interested in you, see how little I amount to!” she cried.  “But if you don’t care about him yourself—­if you’ll—­two weeks, Sylvia—­just keep out for two weeks....”  As if it were part of the leaping forward of her imagination, she suddenly started the car again, and with a whirling, reckless wrench at the steering-wheel she had turned the car about and was racing back over the road they had come.

“Where are you going?” cried Sylvia to her, above the noise of their progress.

“Back!” she answered, laughing out.  “What’s the use of going on now?” She opened the throttle to its widest and pressing her lips together tightly, gave herself up to the intoxication of speed.