ng. "But at her age!"

"Well, I suppose you might say she's kept it for professional reasons,"
the other woman had answered with a false tolerance. "A school teacher,
wanting to be cozy with her kiddies, just a big sister." The tolerance
was too thin, it broke away. "Kind of pathetic, I think. She's so plain,
so very typical of an old maid school teacher. She's just the kind to
keep a name like Miss Kitty."

"What gets me," the first one scoffed, "is her pride in having such a
brilliant mind--if she really does have one. All those academic degrees.
She wears them on every occasion, like a tiara!"

She had drawn back from the door. But in her instant and habitual
introspection, she realized she was less offended than perversely
pleased because, obviously, they were jealous of her intellectual
accomplishments, her ability to meet men on their own ground,
intellectually as good a man as any man.

The half dream drowsiness was sharply washed away by the belated impact
of Sam Eade's question to Lt. Harper. Reality flashed on, and she was
suddenly wide awake in the lifeboat heading back to Earth.

[Illustration]

"What is it you must tell me?" She spoke loudly and crisply to the men's
broad backs where they sat in front of the instrument panel. The
implication of the question, itself, that they had been holding
something back....

Lt. Harper turned slowly around in his seat and looked at her with that
detested expression of amused tolerance which his kind of adult male
affected toward females. He was the dark, ruggedly handsome type, the
kind who took it for granted that women should fawn over him. The kind
who would speak the fatuous cliche that a woman's place was in the home,
not gallivanting off to teach colonists' children on the fourth planet
of Procyon. Still, perhaps she was unjust, she hardly knew the man.

"Oh, you awake, Miss Kitty?" he asked easily. His tone, as always, was
diffident, respectful toward her. Odd, she resented that respect from
him, when she would have resented lack of it even more.

"Certainly," she snapped. "What is it you must tell me?"

"When you're dressed, freshened up a bit," he answered, not evasively,
but as if it could wait.

* * * * *

She started to insist, but he had already turned back to the nose window
to study the starry sky and the huge misty green ball of Earth in front
of them. Sam Eade, the radioman, was intently twisting the dials on