“And you don’t remember ever meeting me before?”
He shook his head.
“If you’d recall the circumstances. The lessened atmospheric pressure up here makes my head feel as big and empty as a balloon.”
“Oh, it makes no difference; acquaintances begin only when they get interesting, anyway. How you stare! What are you thinking about me now?”
He had been casting about for words, a metaphor, to describe her; in his youth he had made metaphors, boy’s way, to put into verses.
“I was thinking that you are like this height,” he cried, bending toward her over the yoke of the warping-wheel. The great bird lurched drunkenly, and he threw over the wheel to bring it back into equilibrium. He laughed, made reckless by the answering light in her eyes, and let it lurch in the other direction like a swooping eagle. “Yes, you are like height. You are beautiful, you allure, you call to all a man’s manhood and daring; and yet there is something in your look that makes me tremble, as though you were a blade pointing at my heart. Come, we’re three miles above conventions; you won’t mind if I worship you a little? For you are wonderful and beautiful—beyond belief.”
“Why, and so are you. Or is it only this dizzy loneliness that makes us think so?”
“Who are you?” he demanded. “I knew I’d engaged to take up several women this week, but no one like you. Who are you? Give me a name to call you by. Tell me who you are.”
“Why, only your poor feminine passenger,” she laughed, bending toward him. One lithe arm and hand, gantleted nearly to the elbow in close, white, glistening fur, lay along the aluminium edge of the car. “As for my name, how do you like Alta?”
“Good! I remember just enough Latin to appreciate it. Alta—High! Well—” He threw back his head recklessly—“I’m out for altitude!”