However, she went again the next night. She began to go almost as frequently as momma and Louise, and to understand the unsatisfied restlessness which drove Mrs. Latimer and her friends. She was tired in the morning, and there were more complaints of her work at the office, but she did not care. She felt recklessly that nothing mattered, and she went back to the beach resorts as a thirsty person will tip an emptied glass in which perhaps a drop remains.
“What’s the matter, little one? Got a grouch?” said Louise’s American Beauty man one night He was jovial and bald; his neck bulged over the back of his collar, and he wore a huge diamond on his little finger. Helen did not like him, but it was his party. He owned the big red car in which they had come to the beach, and she felt that his impatient reproach was justified. She was not paying her way.
“Not a bit!” she laughed. “Only for some reason I feel like a cold plum-pudding.”
“What you need’s brandy sauce,” Duddy said, appreciating his own wit.
“You mean you want me to get lit up!”
“That’s the idea! Bring on the booze, let joy be unrefined! Waiter, rye highballs all around!”
She did not object; that did not seem worth while, either. When the glasses came she emptied hers with the rest, and her spirits did seem to lighten a little. “It removes inhibitions,” Gilbert Kennedy had said. And he was gone, too. If he were only there the sparkle of life would come back; she would be exhilarated, witty, alive to her fingertips once more—
The crowd was moving on again. She went with them into the cool night, and it seemed to her that life was nothing but a moving on from dissatisfaction to dissatisfaction. Squeezed into a corner of the tonneau, she relapsed into silence, and it was some time before she noticed the altered note in the excitement of the others.
“Give ’er the gas! Let ’er out! Damn it, if you let ’em pass—!” the car’s owner was shouting, and the machine fled like a runaway thing. Against a blur of racing sand dunes Helen saw a long gray car creeping up beside them. “You’re going to kill us!” momma screamed, disregarded. Helen, on her feet, clinging to the back of the front seat, yelled with the others. “Beat ’im! Beat ’im! Y‑a‑a‑ah!”
Her hat, torn from her head, disappeared in the roaring blur behind them. Her hair whipped her face. She was wildly, gloriously alive. “Faster—faster, oh!” The gray car was gaining. Inch by inch it crawled up beside them. “Can’t you go faster?” she cried in a bedlam of shouts. Oh, if only her hands were on the wheel! It was unbearable that they should lose. “Give ’er more gas—she’ll make eighty-five!” the owner yelled.
Everything in Helen narrowed to the challenge of that plunging gray car. Its passing was like an intolerable pulling of something vital from her grip. Pounding her hand against the car-door she shrieked frantic protests. “Don’t let him do it! Go on! Go on!” The gray car was forging inexorably past them. It swerved. Momma’s scream was torn to ribbons by the wind. It was ahead now, and one derisive yell from its driver came back to them. Their speed slowed.
“He’s turning in at The Tides. Stop there?” the chauffeur asked over his shoulder.
“Yes, damn you! Wha’d yuh think you’re driving, a baby-carriage? You’re fired!” his employer raged, and he was still swearing when Helen, gasping and furious, stumbled from the running-board against Gilbert Kennedy.
“Good Lord, was it you?” he cried. “Some race!” he exulted and swinging her off her feet, he kissed her gayly. Something wild and elemental in her rushed to meet its mate in him. He released her instantly, and in a chorus of greetings, “Drinks on me, old man!” “Some little car you’ve got!” “Come on in!” she found herself under a glare of light in the swirl and glitter of The Tides. He was beside her at the round table, and her heart was pounding.
“No—no—this is on me!” he declared. “Only my money’s good tonight. I’m going to Argentine tomorrow on the water-wagon. What’ll you have?”
They ordered, helter-skelter, in a clamor of surprise and inquiry. “Argentine, what’re you giving us!” “What’s the big idea?” “You’re kidding!”
“On the level. Argentine. Tomorrow. Say, listen to me. I’ve got hold of the biggest proposition that ever came down the pike. Six million acres of land—good land, that’ll raise anything from hell to breakfast. Do you know what people are paying for land in California right now? I’ll tell you. Five hundred, six hundred, a thousand dollars an acre. And I’ve got six million acres of land sewed up in Argentine that I can sell for fifty cents an acre and make—listen to what I’m telling you—and make a hundred percent profit. The Government’s backing me—they’d give me the whole of Argentine. I tell you there’s millions in it!”
He was full of radiant energy and power. Her imagination leaped to grasp the bigness of this project. Thousands of lives altered, thousands of families migrating, cities, villages, railroads built. She felt his kiss on her lips, and that old, inexplicable, magnetic attraction. The throbbing music beat in her veins like the voice of it. He smiled at her, holding out his arms, and she went into them with recklessness and longing.
They were carried together on waves of rhythm, his arms around her, her loosened hair tumbling backward on her neck.
“I’m mad about you!”
“And you’re going away?”
“Sorry?”
“Sorry? Bored. You always do!”
He laughed.
“Not on your life! This time I’m taking you with me.”
“Oh, but I wouldn’t take you—seriously!”
“I mean it. You’re coming.”
“I’m dreaming.”
“I mean it.” His voice was almost savage. “I want you.”
Fear ran like a challenge through her exultation. She felt herself a small fluttering
