He stepped forward and gathered her into his arms. He carried her across the deck toward the glass-encased central cabin, murmuring endearments, his arms tight about her. She rested her head on his chest, pressing her lips against the hollow of his throat, moving them back and forth with the exciting eagerness, the fierce impatience, of an amorously aroused woman abandoning herself to an anticipation of love's delights.
"I will take you to my cabin," he whispered. "It is ill-equipped for the exploration of an experience new to us, for the strange, bright wonder of love's complete fulfillment. There are darts and a circular target on the wall, a double bar on a metal support for morning exercises, a wooden board on a table that I yesterday overturned in rage, because the game of trig, which I have never really liked, seemed to me to have eight ivory-inlaid figures too many and my opponent was more skillful than I. It is a sparsely furnished cabin, an almost Spartan cabin, for the athlete and rather dull-witted agricultural specialist that I thought myself to be."
"Until you fell in love," she whispered.
"Yes, darling, until I fell in love. And there is no man on this ship and no woman who does not now feel as we do. Our rebellion is a courageous one, unalterable in purpose. The ship is ours and we shall take it to sea. We shall know all of love's delights for many days and nights and the Monitors will be powerless to interfere."
They had entered the central cabin and he had set her down and she was walking now with one arm about his waist, her head resting against his shoulder.
The cabin was dimly lighted and on both sides of them the strangest of murmurings arose. They could not see clearly into the shadows, but what they could not see they sensed—the presence everywhere of men and women like themselves, walking back and forth in a trancelike stillness, enraptured by the preliminary intimacies of love. They caught a glimpse of white limbs in the shadows, of bodies pressed breast to breast or even more amorously intertwined, with lips joined to lips and hands interlocked, and there were a dozen lovers standing motionless and making no sound at all.
"Why do they not all go to their cabins?" the woman whispered, brushing with her lips her companion's ear. "You would think they would be consumed with a fierce impatience. There are many things about love that I do not understand."
"They are consumed with impatience," the man replied. "But they wish to prolong what would otherwise be over too quickly. I'm afraid there are many things about love which you have yet to learn."
"Did I not just say so? You are my teacher, are you not?"
"I am, my darling," he whispered. "But you will also be my teacher. There is no end to the things a woman can teach a man about love."