The evening air had become damp and penetrating. It made her throat feel
sore and she choked a little as she breathed it.

Gingerly she approached the motor to make sure. What an absurd phrase!
Why, a leap of her heart would have announced its presence, even had her
eyes been shut.

She knew its every detail, the sound the gears made changing, the feel
of the seat, the way the hood went up. And, above all, the little clock,
ticking its warning by day, regular and relentless, while at night its
bright prying eyes reminded her of all the things she wanted to forget.
"It is my conscience," she would say, "and fate and mortality. It
symbolises all the limitations of life. It is the frontier to
happiness, the defeat of peace."

"Go on," he had said, "and you will end by forgetting it."

It was what he had called her habit of talking things "away."

How often she had slipped into his motor after him, sliding along the
shiny leather, nestling happily against him, explaining that there was
no draught, that the rain was not coming in, that her feet were as warm
as toast. How often he had steered slowly with one hand, while her
fingers crept into the palm of the other. And then he had turned off the
engine and they had sat there together silent and alone, cut off from
the world. How she had loved his motor! Surreptitiously she would caress
it with her hand, stroking the cool shiny leather, and seeing him
looking at her, she would say, "I think my purse must have fallen behind
the seat." It had become to her a child and a mother, a refuge and an
adventure, an island cut off from all the wretched necessities of