Darling Toujours waved a long cigarette holder at the author. "Don't pay any attention to him, Captain. You know how writers are—always putting words in other people's mouths, and not very good ones at that."
"Do you mean not very good words or not very good mouths, my dear?" Carlton asked. The solar system's most famous actress clamped her scarlet lips shut with rage. It would take someone like Carlton E. Carlton, she knew, to point out the one minor blemish in an otherwise perfect body—her slightly over-sized mouth.
She began to wish that she had never left Callisto, that she had cancelled her passage on the Kismet when she learned that Carlton was to be a fellow passenger. But her studio had wired her to return to Earth immediately to make a new series of three dimensional video films. And the Kismet was the only first class space ship flying to Earth for two weeks. So she had kept her ticket in spite of Carlton.
"I must say that I think Miss Toujours has the prettiest mouth I've ever seen," boomed Captain Fogarty, his voice sounding something like a cross between a foghorn and a steam whistle. And he was not merely being gallant, for many a lonely night as he flew the darkness between Earth and the many planets, he had dreamed of caressing those lips.
"And I think you are definitely a man of discriminating taste," said Darling demurely, crossing her legs and arranging her dress to expose a little more of the Toujours charms to the Captain's eye.
Carlton smiled casually at the exposed flesh. "It's all very pretty, my dear," he said smugly. "But we've seen it all before and in space you're supposed to act like a lady, if you can act that well."
Darling Toujours drew back her hand to smack Carlton one in a very unlady-like manner when she suddenly realized that they were not alone. Her hand froze, poised elegantly in mid-air, as she turned to see a newcomer standing at the door.
The witness to the impending slap was a withered little lady, scarcely five feet tall, with silvered hair, eyes that twinkled like a March wind, and a friendly rash of wrinkles that gave her face the kindly, weathered appearance of an old stone idol. Her slight figure was lost in volumes of black cloth draped on her in a manner that had gone out of style at least fifty years before. The little woman coughed politely.
"I beg your pardon," she told them in a sweet, high little voice. "I hope I didn't interrupt anything. If you would like to hit the gentleman, Miss Toujours, I'll be glad to come back later."