“Of course it would never do to leave out Africa,” she assured him comfortingly. “And after all, you’ve only begun, haven’t you, if it’s to be a real ‘world tour’?”
He held up a pleading hand and smiled. “It makes me a little tired to look ahead so far!”
“But don’t you remember how you couldn’t wait to start out in the beginning?”
The impresario bit off the end of a cigar and mused, his words punctuated with spaces of lighting and taking the first rapid puffs: “That was a long while ago, wasn’t it? I thought nothing of such details as world tours then! Yet I truly believe the first feeling of the vastness of our terrestrial ball came upon me—no, you’d laugh!”
“But you know I never laugh!” she reproached him, laughing, her heart beating a little faster as she sensed the trend of the talk.
“Well, then—the very day of the Hoadley auction!”
“Really? Yet you never knew how impressed I was with it all, and what a great thing it seemed to do, though it did go through my head, too, that ‘Singapore’ is—well, a pretty long way off!”
“The place that really began giving me shivers of homesickness,” he confessed, “was Cape Horn!”
There was a silence, and he was musing over her phrase: “A way will open up.” A little later they drove back through the quiet radiance of a tropical afternoon.
“I’m afraid,” she laughed deliciously, “your ‘songbirds’ will make up their minds I’ve carried you right off the island!”