Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/29

Rh scene; and before the end of the voyage the entire saloon is as deeply infected with the "virus of Particularism" as gallant little Wales itself.

To pick up a homeward-bound P. and O. at Gibraltar and to finish with her her journey to England is to assist at a truly melancholy drama of disenchantments. The deck is strewed with the fragments of lightly-made and lightly-broken eternal friendships and with the ashes of extinct flirtations. Bosoms which glowed with reciprocal passion in the Indian Ocean have cooled down in the Red Sea, and mutual admirations have given way to mutual criticism in the Suez Canal. But the short voyage allows no such scope for the display of this particular form of human weakness. It develops no worse characteristic than the somewhat fatuous form of complacent self-absorption which I have endeavoured to describe. And even this resolute refusal on the part of the average man to rise to the level of his