e and try blasting.

It was her first really bad stretch of road. She was frightened. Then
she was too appallingly busy to be frightened, or to be Miss Claire
Boltwood, or to comfort her uneasy father. She had to drive. Her frail
graceful arms put into it a vicious vigor that was genius.

When the wheels struck the slime, they slid, they wallowed. The car
skidded. It was terrifyingly out of control. It began majestically to
turn toward the ditch. She fought the steering wheel as though she were
shadow-boxing, but the car kept contemptuously staggering till it was
sideways, straight across the road. Somehow, it was back again, eating
into a rut, going ahead. She didn't know how she had done it, but she
had got it back. She longed to take time to retrace her own cleverness
in steering. She didn't. She kept going.

The car backfired, slowed. She yanked the gear from third into first.
She sped up. The motor ran like a terrified pounding heart, while the
car crept on by inches through filthy mud that stretched ahead of her
without relief.

She was battling to hold the car in the principal rut. She snatched the
windshield open, and concentrated on that left rut. She felt that she
was keeping the wheel from climbing those high sides of the rut, those
six-inch walls of mud, sparkling with tiny grits. Her mind snarled at
her arms, "Let the ruts do the steering. You're just fighting against
them." It worked. Once she let the wheels alone they comfortably
followed the furrows, and for three seconds she had that delightful
belief of every motorist after every mishap, "Now that this particular
disagreeableness is over, I'll never, never have any trouble again!"

But suppose the engine overheated, ran out of water? Anxiety twanged at
her nerves. And the deep distinctive ruts were changing to a complex
pattern, like the rails in a city switchyard. She picked out the track
of the one motor car that had been through here recently. It was marked
with the swastika tread of the rear tires. That track was her friend;
she knew and loved the driver of a car she had never seen in her life.

She was very tired. She wondered if she might not stop for a moment.
Then she came to an upslope. The car faltered; felt indecisive beneath
her. She jabbed down the accelerator. Her hands pushed at the steering
wheel as though she were pushing the car. The engine picked up, sulkily
kept going. To the eye, there was merely a rise in the rolling ground,