It was all on account of Martia, he thought sullenly. She was the daughter of that stuck up English woman. He didn't like people like that, with her airs and the big pretense she put up trying to appear to be still the great lady, with her hatboxes and her governess. Lady Dewitt his foot! Everybody knew that such anachronisms were on their last legs now, with war economies eating away the foundations of landed wealth in England. If Martia weren't merely fifteen years old or so, Henry would have accused Lady Dewitt, in his mind, of coming to New York to catch her daughter a wealthy American husband. Actually, she was just another English evacuee. They were coming to Canada and the States by the tens of thousands, on the eve of war, inasmuch as World War Three's version of the V-2 was expected to be atomic—and England was becoming a glorified foxhole.
Martia had seemed to reflect her mother's snobbishness, in a way, but she was strikingly pretty and had the biggest, bluest—However, it wasn't the color of her eyes that had made Henry fall all over himself at the airport in London. He could not define it, but it was a powerful thing that had made him seem not to care what anyone thought. Martia, with her smug chin, pug nose, brunette bangs and patrician attitude, had some indefinable something about her that he knew he could never find again—in his entire life. And which was vitally important to him, alone.
So from that moment on, many of the passengers had been aware that he was "that way" about the English girl, in spite of the Lady Dewitt's determination to place all possible barriers in his path. She had lost no time in investigating Uncle Andy and discovering that he was, according to the passenger list, a mere construction engineer, and that Henry was an adopted orphan whose genealogy had been lost in one of the many obscurities resulting from World War II.
Heck!—thought Henry. I don't want to marry the little snob! I just wanted to—"Oh, excuse me!" he exclaimed, bumping into someone at the head of the staircase.
He turned around and was surprised to discover that no one was in the aisle. Yet he had bumped into someone!
"What for?" asked a young G.I. seated at his elbow.
Henry looked at the friendly, round face of the soldier. He looked at the other soldiers next to him, and at those in the seat ahead of them. They were all looking at him strangely, but not belligerently. He thought: They're coming home from U.N. duty. Troop rotation. Maybe soon they'll have to go back and really use their guns. Uncle Andy said that if by next spring, in 1960—
A strange ringing sound was in Henry's ears and he felt vaguely airsick.
"I thought I bumped into somebody," he answered, lamely. And he still looked at the soldiers.