"Let's forget it all, Craig! Rubies aren't important enough. The one Gil brought me from that trading-post of Terra isn't—wasn't—"
Verrill said sourly: "That's what makes me feel so foolish about it. He brought you a souvenir, and I grabbed it from you, flung it into the lake, and pasted him. What for?"
"Oh, Craig, who cares! Gil was lording it over you. I was too smug and pleased with the gift to realize how far he was going. Oh, all right, of course you were wrong! But what of it?"
Verrill shook his head. "I fairly shouted myself into it."
"I don't want you to go."
"I know you don't. But too many of our friends were within sight and hearing of the whole mess. Sooner or later their attitude would make you unhappy about a man who talked big, and then backed down."
His insistence widened Linda's eyes. The civilized Venusians were always ready to take the sensible, the expedient way. Had they been otherwise, had they not been the descendants of sensible Terrestrian ancestors, they would have been included in the devastation which had left all but small and widely scattered patches of Terra uninhabitable for the past seven-hundred years. Rather, those who today were Venusians would have been struggling savages, scraping out a living in some uncontaminated area.
Verrill's was an almost Terrestrian stubbornness; something primitive and atavistic, very much like that queer quirk which made some Venusians return to their native Earth to set up trading-posts, where they bartered with the barbarian tribesmen for tobacco and wines, spices and jewels and perfumes, all manner of luxuries which Venus did not offer.
Linda made her final appeal: "Leaving all this, to scramble around in that terrible waste and desolation—oh, do be sensible!"