"My grandmother could not have been nicer."
"What do you mean by that?" Jones absently inquired.
But, in the rotunda now, Mr. Purdy was asking her address. If he had dared he would have followed her there. Fortune favouring, he would have followed her to the ends of the earth. It was what one of our allies calls the thunderbolt. Never before had he beheld such a face. Earnestly he prayed that he might behold it again. Allah is great. The prayer was granted.
In the cañon below, Jones, as he piloted her to the subway, pulled at his gloves.
"If I had the ability, I would write an opera, call it 'Danaë' and offer you the title-rôle."
Cassy, her thoughts on her grandmother, repeated it. "Danaë?"
"Yes, the lady disconnected by marriage with Jupiter who tubbed her in gold—gold ink, I suppose. But as I am not a composer I shall put you between the sheets—of a novel I mean. Fiction has its consolations."
But now, leaving the cañon, they entered a cavern which a tunnel fluted. There Cassy looked up at the inkbeast. "How is Mr. Lennox? Do you see him?"
"I find it very difficult not to. Unattached people are sticky as flies. When Lennox was engaged, he was invisible. Now he is all over the place."
From the tunnel a train erupted. It came with the belch of a monstrous beetle, red-eyed and menacing, hastening terribly to some horrible task.