When Worlds Collide (When Worlds Collide 1)
“Then what is it, to-night? What’s changed you?”
“How am I changed?”
“You drive me mad, Eve; you know it. You’re lovely in face, and beautiful in body; and besides, with a brain that your father’s trained so that you’re beyond any other girl—and most men too. You’re way beyond me, but I love you; and you don’t listen to me.”
“I do!”
“You’re not listening to me even now. You’re thinking instead.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Feel!”
“Oh, I can do that, too.”
“I know; then why don’t you—and stop thinking?”
“Wait! Not now, Tony.… Do you suppose that’s the ship?”
“Why do you care? See here, Eve, is there anything in that newspaper story your father and you have been denying all afternoon?”
“What story?”
“That something unusual is up between all the big scientific leaders.”
“There’s always something up in science,” Eve evaded.…
The doors were flung wide open. Music blared from the radio. In the drawing-room a half-dozen people continued to dance. Another group surrounded the punch-bowl. The butler was passing a tray of sandwiches. Some one stepped out and asked Eve to dance, and she went in with him.
Tony wandered in from the terrace.
The butler stopped before him. “Sandwich, Mr. Drake?”
“Keep three of the tongue for me, Leighton,” Tony said solemnly. “I want to take them home to eat in bed.”
The butler nodded indulgently. “Certainly, Mr. Drake. Anything else?”
“Possibly an anchovy.”
“Very good, Mr. Drake.”
&nbs
p; An arm encircled Tony’s broad shoulders. “Hello, Tony. Say—give me the low-down on what shot the market to hell’s basement to-day.”
Tony frowned; his eyes were following Eve. “Why do you compliment me with thinking I may know?”
“It’s something happened in Africa, I hear. Anyway, the African cables were carrying it. But what could happen down there to shoot hell out of us this way? Another discovery of gold? A mountain of gold that would make gold so cheap it would unsettle everything?”
“Cheap gold would make stocks dear—not send them down,” Tony objected.
“Sure; it can’t be that. But what could happen in South Africa that—”
Tony returned alone to the terrace. His senses were swept by intimate thoughts of Eve: A perfume called Nuit Douce. Gold lights in her red-brown hair. Dark eyes. The sweep of a forehead behind which, in rare company, a woman’s instincts and tenderness dwelt with a mind ordinarily as honest and unevasive as a man’s. All the tremendous insignificances that have meaning to a man possessed by the woman he loves.
He stood spellbound, staring through the night.… Anthony Drake was an athlete—that would have been the second observation another man would have made of him. The first, that he owned that uncounterfeitable trait which goes with what we call good birth and breeding, and generations of the like before him.
With this he had the physical sureness and the gestures of suppressed power which are the result of training in sports. He had the slender waist of a boxer, with the shoulders of a discus thrower. His clothes always seemed frail in comparison with his physique.