The Argosy, Vol. 81, No. 4 — page 15: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

FOUR SPEEDS FOR FOREST HILL. had to explain and show to her all the work- ings of the controls. He had to demon- strate the possibilities of handling with spark and throttle alone. Since she expected to drive the car her- self, he had to go into matters more strictly pertaining to a lesson than a sale. The realization that there would be other lessons to give set him talking up the car as he had seldom talked to a prospective buyer before. But as they took the top of Montclair’s hill with a rush, and then slid down into the long stretch of level road beyond Cald- well, her questions grew fewer. It was not long before his talk became interspersed with pauses that grew longer. A lot of poetic nonsense has been written and spoken about those soulful pauses. You. might get the idea that they proceed from a rapport of souls which needs no language to wireless emotions from heart to heart. Get that idea out of your system. The secret of those pauses lies in the fact that the man forgets to talk about anything else while he wonders how, if, and whether he dares say one thing; and that the girl is afraid to talk of anything else for fear she’ll keep him from saying that one thing. . Of course we would not predicate just those motives for Arlene Atherton’s silence. Perhaps she was merely thinking of the car, listening in rapt abstraction to its rhythmic hum. Perhaps she was figuring on how to wheedle out of her father two hundred dol- lars more than he had mentioned as his willingness to pay for her car. Anyhow, she was not wholly forgetful of the existence of the proprieties. A vague feeling seemed to disturb, with the thought that the scene before her was considerably farther from home than a mere demonstra- tion of a car could warrant—especially by moonlight. “Where in the world are we?”’ she finally broke in upon the longest pause. “T just want to see if she’ll do Fox Hill on high,” he explained. “Fox Hill!” she gasped. He did not gasp, but he held his breath. He had set himself to put the momentarily all important query at the top of Fox Hill. Fox Hill seemed essential to the purpose. She did not tell him to turn around. He took more courage. And the car took Fox Hill on high gear. Just over the top he stopped. He swallowed hard. It was as if he had actually run up the hill on his own legs. 581 i\ Arlene was staring through a break in the woods at the valley below. It was a scene for a poet or a girl to rave over—low-lying mists thinly veiling the modest meadow from the silver gaze of the moon, hillocks tipped with white-blossomed apple-trees and dogwood, here and there a twinkling light in some enchanted farm-house, above all the mother-hills brooding over the silent, sleeping vales; mystery, mysticism, wonder. “Well, do you like it?” Orton asked huskily. ‘Tt is superb,” she answered in a whisper. “You're sure you want one?” To him there was but one view. He dared not look at it—the curl on one cheek, the tilt of the nose, the turn of the lips made a combination that would upset his carefully planned campaign. Wherefore he looked and spoke of the car. To her his words were disillusioning. She had thought him capable of appreciating such a scene as this, she had counted him a part of it, the human embodiment of its romance. And—he was just an automobile salesman. “Oh, yes,” she said dully. “You shall have one,” he told her. “Of course, I’m not sure that father will let me,” she now came back from the realm of dreams to say. “He said six hundred was to be the limit. But—” “But I want to make you a present of one,” he elucidated. Then ensued a silence of seconds, during which his feelings were probably similar to those of the blind-folded man sitting in the electric chair and waiting for the current to come. Of course, the moment the words had passed his lips, he knew she would turn him down hard. CHAPTER Iii. A NOVELTY IN PROPOSALS. f{XACTLY six men had proposed to Arlene Atherton since her “coming out” three years before. Of the six only one had made a decent job of it, saying the kind of things that go to make up declarations of love in all the best-sellers. He was the one whom, when she had rejected him, and he had tragically asserted his intention to enter a monastery, she had told that he would find things more congenial in a sisterhood. But this certainly was the most bungling thing she had got in the way of a proposal VOOKS CEOMMUC (E@)