After a silence: “It’s been a rotten voyage, hasn’t it?” he remarked.
“Perfectly rotten. I was so ill I could scarcely keep my place during life-drill.... I didn’t see you there,” she added with a faint smile, “but I’m sure you were aboard, even if you seem to doubt that I was.”
And then, perhaps considering that she had been sufficiently amiable to him, she gave him his congé with a pleasant little nod.
“Could I help you––do anything––” he began. But she thanked him with friendly finality.
They sauntered in opposite directions; and he did not see her again to speak to her.
Later, jolting toward home in a taxi, it occurred to him that it might have been agreeable to see such an attractively informal girl again. Any man likes informality in women, except among the women of his own household, where he would promptly brand it as indiscretion.
He thought of her for a while, recollecting details of the episode and realising that he didn’t even know her name. Which piqued him.
“Serves me right,” he said aloud with a shrug of finality. “I had more enterprise once.”
Then he looked out into the sunlit streets of Manhattan, all brilliant with flags and posters and swarming with prosperous looking people––his own people. But to his war-enlightened and disillusioned eyes his own people seemed almost like aliens; he vaguely resented their too evident prosperity, their irresponsible immunity, their heedless preoccupation with the petty things of life. The acres of bright flags fluttering above them, the posters that made a gay back-ground for the scene, the sheltered, undisturbed routine of peace seemed to annoy him.