"For one thing, we can see so much farther."
"Oh, ridiculous! we can't see nearly so far!"
"We can see so much farther and wider, deeper, clearer. The day blinds us. Spoils our sense of proportion. At night we see more of what creation really is. Our sun becomes one little star among thousands of greater ones, and we are humbled into a reasonableness which is very hard not to lose in the bewilderments of daylight."
Ramsey sank to the arm of a chair, but when he remained standing she stood again. "Wasn't you saying something like that the evening we left New Orleans?" she asked.
"To my father, yes. I couldn't have said it in daylight then. I couldn't say it in daylight now to any one but you, Ramsey."
Her heart leaped again. Her eyes looked straight into his; could not look away. He spoke on:
"You're a kind of evening to me, yourself; evening star."
Her bosom pounded. She glanced up behind to the pilots. Watson had the wheel. As she strenuously pushed back her curls she felt her temples burn. She could have cried aloud for Hugh to cease, yet was mad for him to go on.
And so he did. "You are my evening star in this nightfall of affliction. I tell you so not in weakness but in strength and in defiance: in the strength I summon for the hour before me; in the defiance I fling to your brothers. I may never have another chance. If ours were the ordinary chances of ordinary life I should say nothing now. I should wait; wait and give love time; time to prove itself in me—in both of us. I ask nothing. I am too new to you, life is too new—to you—for pledges."
She flashed him a glance and then, looking up the river, said, with the ghost of a toss: "I'm older than you think."