Page:Tales for Christmas Eve (Broughton).djvu/208

 have yet to learn. There are ten minutes to spare, and the Salle is filling fuller and fuller every moment. Chiefly my countrymen, countrywomen, and country children, beginning to troop home to their partridges. I look curiously round at them, speculating as to which of them will be my companion or companions through the night.

There are no very unusual types: girls in sailor hats and blonde hair-fringes; strong-minded old maids in painstakingly ugly waterproofs; baldish fathers; fattish mothers; a German or two, with prominent pale eyes and spectacles. I have just decided on the companions I should prefer; a large young man, who belongs to nobody, and looks as if he spent most of his life in laughing—(Alas! he is not likely! he is sure to want to smoke!)—and a handsome and prosperous-looking young couple. They are more likely, as very probably, in the man's case, the bride-love