II
It was warm in the Transit¹ Passenger Lounge at Frankfurt, so Sir StaffordNye slipped back his cloak, allowing its crimson² lining³ to drape itself spec-tacularly round his shoulders. He was drinking a glass of beer and listen-ing with half an ear to the various announcements as they were made.
‘Flight 4387. Flying to Moscow. Flight 2381 bound for Egypt and Cal-cutta.’
Journeys all over the globe. How romantic it ought to be. But there wassomething about the atmosphere of a Passengers’ Lounge in an airportthat chilled romance. It was too full of people, too full of things to buy, toofull of similarly coloured seats, too full of plastic, too full of human beings,too full of crying children. He tried to remember who had said:
I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face.
Chesterton perhaps? It was undoubtedly⁴ true. Put enough people togetherand they looked so painfully alike that one could hardly bear it. An inter-esting face now, thought Sir Stafford. What a difference it would make. Helooked disparagingly⁵ at two young women, splendidly made up, dressed inthe national uniform of their country–England he presumed–of shorterand shorter miniskirts, and another young woman, even better made up–in fact quite good-looking–who was wearing what he believed to be calleda culotte suit. She had gone a little further along the road of fashion.
He wasn’t very interested in nice-looking girls who looked like all theother nice-looking girls. He would like someone to be different. Someonesat down beside him on the plastic- covered artificial leather settee onwhich he was sitting. Her face attracted his attention at once. Not pre-cisely because it was different, in fact he almost seemed to recognize it asa face he knew. Here was someone he had seen before. He couldn’t re-member where or when but it was certainly familiar. Twenty-five or six,he thought, possibly, as to age. A delicate high-bridged aquiline⁶ nose, ablack heavy bush of hair reaching to her shoulders. She had a magazine infront of her but she was not paying attention to it. She was, in fact, lookingwith something that was almost eagerness at him. Quite suddenly shespoke. It was a deep contralto voice, almost as deep as a man’s. It had avery faint foreign accent. She said,

分享到：