Her manipulation of the wheel was witchcraft. The roadster slid in and out of traffic like a fluid thing, an enamel stream, silent as a swift current in a river. “Can’t let her out here,” said Paula. “Wait till we get past Lincoln Park. Do you suppose they’ll ever really get rid of this terrible Rush Street bridge?” When his house was reached, “I’m coming up,” she said. “I suppose you haven’t any tea?” “Gosh, no! What do you think I am! A young man in an English novel!” “Now, don’t be provincial and Chicago-ish, Dirk.” They climbed the three flights of stairs. She looked about. Her glance was not disapproving. “This isn’t so bad. Who did it? She did! Very nice. But of course you ought to have your own smart little apartment, with a Jap to do you up. To do that for you, for example.” “Yes,” grimly. He was packing his bag—not throwing clothes into it, but folding them deftly, neatly, as the son of a wise mother packs. “My salary’d just about keep him in white linen house-coats.” She was walking about the living room, picking up a book, putting it down, fingering an ash tray, gazing out of the window, examining a photograph, smoking a cigarette from the box on his table. Restless, nervously alive, catlike. “I’m going to send you some things for your room, Dirk.” “For God’s sake don’t!” “Why not?” “Two kinds of women in the world. I learned that at college. Those who send men things for their rooms and those that don’t.” “You’re very rude.” “You asked me. There! I’m all set.” He snapped the lock of his bag. “I’m sorry I can’t give you anything. I haven’t a thing. Not even a glass of wine and a—what is it they say in books?—oh, yeh—a biscuit.” In the roadster again they slid smoothly out along the drive, along Sheridan Road, swung sharply around the cemetery curve into Evanston, past the smug middle-class suburban neatness of Wilmette and Winnetka. She negotiated expertly the nerve-racking curves of the Hubbard Woods hills, then maintained a fierce and steady speed for the remainder of the drive. “We call the place Stormwood,” Paula told him. “And nobody outside the dear family knows how fitting that is. Don’t scowl. I’m not going to tell you my marital woes. And don’t you say I asked for it. . . . How’s the job?” “Rotten.” “You don’t like it? The work?” “I like it well enough, only—well, you see we leave the university architectural course thinking we’re all going to be Stanford Whites or Cass Gilberts, tossing off a Woolworth building and making ourselves famous overnight. I’ve spent all yesterday and to-day planning how to work in space for toilets on every floor of the new office building, six stories high and shaped like a drygoods box, that’s going up on the corner of Milwaukee Avenue and Ashland, west.” “And ten years from now?” “Ten years from now maybe they’ll let me do the plans for the drygoods box all alone.” “Why don’t you drop it?” He was startled. “Drop it! How do you mean?”