Alpha Centauri had gathered about her many charming people, their entertaining company made life bearable during the tedious ending of the tour. There were several ladies with husbands, two young girls with cavaliers, and an interesting Mamma who did the talking for them. The girls were very pretty and the cavaliers devoted. One was a young doctor—we’ve all met him. The other was a descendant of the man who melted the emerald and kept it to himself. Naturally the young man was rather mournful and stilted, his pride was inherited—keeping a secret is a most acrobatic feat. There was a companionable literary man constantly deep in inspired thought. He did not alarm with allusions to the plot of his forthcoming book, but occasionally boasted of a world of his own—as they all do—and limited his conversation to current topics. His briefness was fascinating—an art. Then we had a mineralogist whose deep scientific problem was—sleep. Occasionally he woke up and became as frisky as a boy of fifty. His wife was the only woman I ever met who could keep up an incessant chatter and still be interesting. There was a tragedian, playwright, all in one, including a wife. The tragedies this gentleman wrote were excellent farces. He was the greatest humorist of the time. His wit was sharp, broad and frequently coarse, but he handled his subject with such rare delicacy that it took a couple of days to discover that he shouldn’t have told the joke and we shouldn’t have laughed. The wife was a beautiful, fair woman of that type that most men are willing some other fellow shall possess. Everybody was very kind to me, and were I not so desperately in love and therefore desperately unhappy, I would have greatly enjoyed the trip throughout this strange land. The country was rapidly changing in appearance. We sailed over a range of burnt, dwarfed mountains enclosing completely a vast desert which narrowed to meet a neck of land that stretched across the ocean, connecting Centauri with the Vespa Belt. This connecting land was fifty miles long, twenty wide, and most of the time submerged.