CHAPTER XII
"How very different Venus looks now to what it does from the earth," said Zaidie, a couple of mornings later, by earth-time, as she took her eye away from the telescope through which she had been examining an enormous golden crescent which spanned the dark vault of Space ahead of and slightly below the Astronef.
"Yes," replied Redgrave, "she looks——"
"How do you know that she is a she?" said Zaidie, getting up and laying a hand on his shoulder as he sat at his own telescope. "Of course I know what you mean, that according to our own ideas on earth, it is the planet or the world which has been supposed for ages to, as it were, shine upon the lovers of earth with the light reflected from the—the—well, I suppose you know what I mean."
"Seeing that you are the most perfect terrestrial incarnation of the said goddess that I have seen yet," he replied, slipping his arm round her waist and pulling her down on to his knees, "I don't think that that is quite the view you ought to take. Surely if Venus ever had a daughter——"
"Oh, nonsense! After we've travelled all these millions of miles together do you really expect me to believe stuff like that?"
"My dear girl-graduate," he said, tightening his grip round her waist a little, "you know perfectly well that if we had travelled beyond the limits of the Solar System, if we had outsailed old Halley's Comet itself, and dived into the uttermost depths of Space outside the Milky Way, you and I would still be a man and a woman, and, being, as may be presumed, more or less in love with each other——"
"Less indeed!" said Zaidie; "you're speaking for yourself, I hope."
And then when she had partially disengaged herself and sat up straight, she said between her laughs——
"Really, Lenox, you're quite absurd for a person who has been married as long as you have, I don't mean in time, but in Space. Was it a thousand years or a couple of hundred million miles ago that we were married? Really I am getting my ideas of time and space quite mixed up.