"Luckily?" Emrys echoed.
"Luckily for him, I mean." The old man sighed. "But you are too young to understand." Then his dark face relaxed into a smile. "I won't ask if you received the letter I sent when you first arrived on Earth. I can understand that a young man would wish the society of other—young people."
Emrys avoided Dyall's eye, and, so doing, met the gaze of the girl standing next to the old man, and stopped, transfixed. She was very young, less than forty, he judged, perhaps even less than thirty.
It was long since he had seen a woman like her. Her hair was a soft yellow, the only natural color among all the women in the room. Her face was painted pink and white, not the blues fashionable that year. Instead of being twisted and bedizened with cloth into fantastic shapes and protuberances, her pretty body was clad in a simple translucent slip. Yet, in spite of her almost deliberate dowdiness, she was beautiful—not the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but the most ... no, striking was not it, either. What was the word he wanted? He could not dredge it out of the pool in which so many of his memories had been submerged for want of room.
"This is my great-great-granddaughter Megan," Dyall introduced her. The girl nodded and smiled. After a moment, Emrys forced himself to do the same.
"I won't press you to come visit us, Mr. Shortmire," Dyall said to Emrys as he and his descendant finally turned to leave, "but I hope that you will."
"We should be so glad to see you," the girl said, with a shy smile.
"Perhaps—perhaps I will come," he found himself saying. "One day." The two men shook hands, and Nicholas Dyall and his great-great-granddaughter moved away. Emrys stared after them for a minute; then, without paying any attention to the exhibits, he went back to his house and spent the rest of the evening staring at the falling flakes in his snowplace.
For years, he had thought he'd lost any capacity to feel. Now he knew that was not true ... because he had been moved by Megan Dyall. How, he could not say—not even whether it was love or hate he felt toward her—but he felt. That was the important thing, and, because of that, he had to take the risk and call on them.