"Rush, dear, don't be silly. I am perfectly all right--or would be if I
hadn't drunk quite so much champagne. They'll take me home. His wife's
here with him and they're old friends of mine. They know a lot of our
friends in Chicago. Please, Rush...."

"Do you think I'd go back to that--" he managed to pull up on the edge
of an ugly word--"back to those people, and leave you here? Is it your
wrap on that chair? We'll stop and get it and then we'll go."

She could have wept with vexation over the way her scheme had gone awry
but there was clearly nothing else to do. She retrieved her cloak, simply
said good night to Christabel and the man named Black, leaving Baldy to
explain things as he chose.

Five minutes later she gave a taxi driver the address of her flat and
dropped back against the cushions beside her brother. Neither of them
spoke a word during that fifteen-minute drive. Mary wept quietly most of
the way--it didn't matter there in the dark. The thought of this splendid
glorious brother of hers painfully endeavoring to drag himself back into
a state of sobriety from his first wild caper after long wearing of the
harness of discipline--an escapade she supposed that he must have been
looking forward to for days--dragging himself back to protect her--oh, it
was too hopeless! Should she ever be able to explain to him why she had
sent for him, and that her intentions had been the opposite of those of
the moralizing meddler he would take her for? If only she could make it
up to him somehow. She would have liked to reach over and pull him down
into her arms, mother him and tell him not to mind--there was something
so intolerably pathetic about his effort to sit soberly straight--but she
resisted this impulse savagely. The alcohol in her own veins was
responsible for this. She could not quite trust herself not to go