“Oh, I feel all right, aside from the fact that I can’t remember engaging a passenger for this trip.”
“That’s not worth worrying about now,” she assured him, smiling in a dim, dangerous way into his eyes. “What does the barograph read?”
He had to bend down close to read the dial. “Fifteen thousand three hundred,” he said with a stray air, and lifted his head to stare at her. “I’ll not cut out the muffler until we stop rising; the exhaust makes a ghastly clatter up here. It jabbers like the ghost of itself.”
“I love it; it sounds—high,” she said, and again he was thrilled by the weird music of her voice. It allured, it inspired like a bugle-note, and yet there was a chilling something in it. It reminded him of the “ice-crackle,” that peculiar trilling reverberation from the expanding of thin, new ice on the skating lakes of his boyhood. One glided along over the thin, glass-clear surface, one saw the steel-blue water just beneath, one heard the sudden silvery “Kr-r-r-ring!” of the ice-crackle, and one put his whole soul into speed.
He stared at her, racking his benumbed wits to remember her place on his passenger-list. Like most of the new pilots, he was accustomed to earn an honest penny now and then by taking up persons with the desire and the necessary fifty dollars. She frankly yielded herself to his inspection; she turned farther around in her seat and smiled at him.
“You don’t remember me?”
“No; that’s astounding, but true.”
She was exquisite, perfect in every line, beautiful with the abstract beauty of an idealist painter’s work. An artist might have called her a “pure type”; there was no little trick of outline or coloring to give personality, character, to the flawless symmetry of her face. She seemed less a real woman than some ideal created to embody an idea: she might have stood for “Purity,” or, perhaps better, “Danger.” Her beauty lost nothing by its impersonality; to Reese’s sun-dazzled eyes, at least it was all the more poignant. The faint scarlet of her lips, the scintillating blue-black of her eyes, the flashing gold of her hair, and the sheer radiant white of all the rest of her allured, intoxicated, astounded. He breathed quickly for reasons other than the thinness of the air. She was unhuman, almost superhuman, for sheer perfection of line and color.
“Well, you have been staring at me for some time,” she said without the slightest show of self-consciousness. “Do you like me?”
“Yes, wonderfully,” he declared, as calmly frank as she herself was.