“You might say thanks, Joe.”
Her eyes were shining, but she looked proud, too.
“I put it in Dad’s head that that was what you’d like better than anything else,” she told him. “If I can’t go up in the Platform myself—and I can’t—I wanted you to. Because I knew you wanted to.”
She smiled at him as he tried incoherently to talk. With a quiet maternal patience, she led him out on the porch of her father’s house and sat there and listened to him. It was a long time before he realized that she was humoring him. Then he stopped short and looked at her suspiciously. He found that in his enthusiastic gesticulations he had been gesticulating with her hand as well as his own.
“I guess I’m pretty crazy,” he said ruefully. “Shooting off my mouth about myself up there in space.... You’re pretty decent to stand me the way I am, Sally.”
He paused. Then he said humbly: “I’m plain lucky. But knowing you and—having you like me reasonably much is pretty lucky too!”
She looked at him noncommittally.
He added painfully: “And not only because you spoke to your father and told him just the right thing, either. You’re—sort of swell, Sally!”
She let out her breath. Then she grinned at him.
“That’s the difference between us, Joe,” she told him. “To me, what you just said is the most important thing anybody’s said tonight.”