“I give you fifteen minutes. Is that sufficient? Make yourself gay. Don’t forget, a tweed suit, brown shoes, a gray felt hat--oh, and a red tie if you’ve got one. I couldn’t endure anything black.” I found her with her eager face turned towards the doorway, watching impatiently for me. “A good beginning--ready to the second. Jump in. We’re off to somewhere where no one’ll know anything about us. Let’s see if we can’t lose ourselves.” She swung the car round and away we snorted, through the Place de la Concorde blanched in sunlight, up the Champs Elysées where sunlight spattered against blossoming trees and lay in pools on the turf. The streets were animated with little children, women in bright dresses, dashing cars and carriages. Paris gleamed white and green and golden. Overhead the sky foamed and bubbled, yawning into blue and primrose gulleys, trampled by stampeding clouds. At the Place de l’Etoile the car drew up sharply and skidded; circled like a hound picking up the scent; then darted swiftly away to the Bois, where fashionables already loitered and acacias trembled murmurously. Fiesole was radiant with impatience. A goddess of speed, she bent above the wheel, casting her eyes along the road ahead. Did a gap occur in the traffic, she flung the car forward, driving recklessly, yet always with calculated precision. I marveled at her nerve and the silent power that lay hidden in her thin, fine hands. As we shot the bridge at St. Cloud the pace quickened. It was as though she shook Paris from her skirts and ran panting to meet wider stretches of wind-bleached country. I had one vivid glimpse of the ribbon of blue river, boat-dotted, winding through young green of woodlands; then cities and sophistication, and all things save Fiesole, myself, and the future were at an end. Soon the white road curved uninterrupted before us, a streak between pollarded trees and blown meadows. Over the horizon came bounding hills and church-spires, villages and rivers; as they came near to us they halted, like shy deer, for a second; when we drew level, they fled. It was as though we were stationary and the world was rushing past us. The wind of our going brought color to her cheeks and fluttered out her hair. Her eyes were starry, fixed on the distance as she skirted the rim of eternity in her daring. Should an axle break or a tire burst, all this fire of youth would be extinguished forever. I glanced at the speedometer; it quivered from seventy to eighty, to eighty-five kilometers, and there it hovered. The throb of the engine seemed the throb of my passion. We were traveling too fast for talking. She did not want to talk; she was escaping from something, memories, perhaps--hers and mine. In her modern way she was expressing what I had always felt: the tedium of captivity, sameness, and disappointment--the need for the unwalled garden, where barriers of obedience and duty are broken down.