Chapter 7: Unspoken Love

Unspoken love! I think if I had yielded to the impulse of my heart, I would have poured out all those protestations of a lover’s ecstasy, incongruous here upon this starlit public deck, to a girl I hardly knew.

I think, too, she might have received them with a tender acquiescence.

The starlight was mirrored in her dark eyes. Misty eyes, with great reaches of unfathomable space in their depths. Yet I felt their tenderness.

Unfathomable strangeness of love! Who am I to write of it, with all the poets of all the ages striving to express the unexpressible? A bond, strangely fashioned by nature, between me and this little dark-haired Earth beauty. As though marked by the stars we were destined to be lovers...

Thus ran the romance of my unspoken thoughts. But I was sitting quietly in the deck chair, striving to regard her gentle beauty impersonally.

And saying:

“But Miss Prince, why are you and your brother going to Ferrok-Shahn?

His business--”

Even as I voiced it, I hated myself for such a question. So nimble is the human mind that mingled with my rhapsodies of love was my need for information of George Prince...

“Oh,” she said, “this is pleasure, not business, for George.” It seemed to me that a shadow crossed her expressive face. But it was gone in an instant, and she smiled. “We have always wanted to travel. We are alone in the world, you know--our parents died when we were children.”

I filled in her pause. “You will like Mars--so many interesting things to see.”

She nodded. “Yes, I understand so. Our Earth is so much the same all over, cast all in one mould.”

“But a hundred or two hundred years ago it was not, Miss Prince. I have read how the picturesque Orient, differing from--well, Great-New York, or London, for instance--”

“Transportation did that,” she interrupted eagerly. “Made everything the same--the people all look alike--dress alike.”

We discussed it. She had an alert, eager mind, childlike with its curiosity, yet strangely matured. And her manner was naïvely earnest.

Yet this was no clinging vine, this little Anita Prince. There was a firmness, a hint of masculine strength in her chin, and in her manner.

“If I were a man, what wonders I could achieve in this marvelous age!”

Her sense of humor made her laugh at herself. “Easy for a girl to say that,” she added.

“You have greater wonders to achieve, Miss Prince,” I said impulsively.

“Yes? What are they?” She had a very frank and level gaze, devoid of coquetry.

My heart was pounding. “The wonders of the next generation. A little son, cast in your own gentle image--”

What madness, this clumsy brash talk! I choked it off.

But she took no offense. The dark rose-petals of her cheeks were mantled deeper red, but she laughed.