“Don’t fool yourself,” Mason told her. “I saw the expression in his eyes when he was dancing with her last night.”
“You’d be surprised at what men can do with their eyes in the tropics,” she told him, laughing. “Have you noticed the tall, brown-haired girl with blue eyes and the white sharkskin dress, who was weighted down with leis — the one who was standing with her father up there on the...”
“I noticed her,” Mason said. “What about her?”
“I think she has some claim on Hungerford,” Della Street said. “She’s Celinda Dail. Her father’s C. Whitmore Dail — if that means anything. They’re wallowing in wealth, have a big suite on A deck.”
“Well,” Mason said, smiling at her, “you do get around, don’t you? How about dropping our leis, Della?”
She nodded. “I’m going to save one for the night of the captain’s dinner. I’ll have the room steward put it in the ice box.”
They performed the ceremony of consigning their flowers to the dark waters. “Why is it,” Della Street asked, as Mason’s last lei vanished into the darkness, “that all of these things we’d consider superstitions on the Mainland seem so real here?”
“Because so many people believe them,” he told her. “Mass belief is a tangible psychic force. Notice the authenticated stories of persons who have violated Island beliefs and come to grief. Thousands of people have known of the violated tabu. Thousands of minds have believed some evil was going to befall the violator.”
“Like hypnotism?” she asked.
“You might call it that.”