and."

"Beg pardon?"

"Samarkand."

"Oh, yeh. Samar--le' see now, where is that, exactly? I used to know,
but I'm such a hand for forgetting----"

"I don't know," said Maxine, distinctly.

"Don't--but I thought you said you were going----"

"I am. But I don't know where it is."

"Then how----"

"You just go to an office, where there are folders and a man behind the
desk, and you say you want to go to Samarkand. He shows you. You get on
a boat. That's all."

The people from Iowa, and Kansas, and Nebraska and Missouri said, Oh,
yes, and there was nothing like travel. So broadening. Maxine asked them
if they knew about the Vale of Kashmir and one of them, astoundingly
enough, did. A man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who had spent a year there
superintending the erection of a dredge. A plump man, with eyeglasses
and perpetually chewing a dead cigar.

Gold and sunlight, myrrh and incense, the tinkling of anklets. Maxine
clung to these wildly, in her mind.

But Honolulu, the Moana Hotel on Waikiki Beach, reassured her. It was
her dream come true. She knew it would be so when she landed and got her
first glimpse of the dark-skinned natives on the docks, their hats and
necks laden with leis of flowers. There were palm trees. There were
flaming hibiscus hedges. Her bed was canopied with white netting, like
that of a princess (the attendant explained it was to keep out the
mosquitoes).

You ate strange fruits (they grew a little sickening, after a day or
two). You saw Duke, the Hawaiian world champion swimmer, come in on a
surf-board, standing straight and slim and naked like a god of bronze,
balancing miraculously on a plank carried in on the crest of a wave with
the velocity of a steam engine. You saw Japanese women in tight kimonos
and funny little stilted flapping footgear running to catch a street
car; and you laughed at the incongruity of it. You made the three-day
trip to the living volcano at Hilo and sat at the crater's brink
watching the molten lava lake tossing, hissing, writhing. You hung
there, between horror and fascination.

"Certainly a pretty sight, isn't it?" said her fellow travellers. "Makes
the Grand Canyon look sick, I think, don't you?"

"I've never seen it."

"Oh, really!"

On her return from Hilo she saw him. A Vandyke beard; smouldering eyes;
thin red lips; lean nervous hands; white flannel evening clothes;
sunburned a rich brown. Maxine drew a long breath as if she had been
running.