shall, be
eating a breakfast or a dinner together a thousand million miles or more
from New York or London. Your Ladyship must remember that this is only
the first stage on the journey, the jumping-off place as you called it.
You see the distance from Washington to New York is--well, it isn't even
a hop, skip and a jump in comparison with----"

"Oh yes, I see what you mean of course, and so I suppose I had better
cut off or short-circuit such sympathies with Mother Earth as are not
connected with your noble self, and get breakfast ready. How's that?"

"Well," said Lord Redgrave, looking at her as she rose from the table,
"I think our honeymoon in Space is young enough yet to make it possible
for me to say that your Ladyship's opinion is exactly right."

"That's a hopeless commonplace! Really, Lenox, I thought you were
capable of something better than that."

"My dear Zaidie, it has been my fate to have many friends who have had
honeymoons on earth, and some of their experience seems to be that the
man who contradicts his wife during the first six weeks of matrimony
simply makes an ass of himself. He offends her and makes himself
unhappy, and it sometimes takes six months or more to get back to
bearings."

"What a lot of silly men and women you must have known, Lenox. Is that
the way Englishmen start marriage in England? If it is, I don't wonder
at Englishmen coming across the Atlantic in liners and air-ships and so
on to get American wives. I guess you can't understand your own
womenfolk."

"Or perhaps they don't understand us; but anyhow, I don't think I've
made any great mistake."

"No, I don't think you have. Of course if I thought so I wouldn't be
here now. But this is very well for a breakfast talk; all the same, I
should like to know how we are going to take the promenade you promised
me on the surface of the moon?"

"Your Ladyship has only to finish her breakfast, and then everything
shall be made plain to her, even the deepest craters of the mountains of
the moon."

"Very well, then, I will eat swiftly and in obedience; and meanwhile, as
your Lordship seems to have finished, perhaps----"

"Yes, I will go and see to the mechanical necessities," said Redgrave,
swallowing his last cup of coffee, and getting up. "If you'll come down
to the lower deck when you've finished, I'll have your breathing-suit
ready for you, and then we'll go into the air-chamber."

"Thanks, dear, yes," she said, putting out he