THE BOREDOM OF TRAVEL! THERE IS AN ACUTE CONDITION
which develops in enforced lulls before the wholesome drudgery
of getting from place to place makes a brute of one again. If
you knew how bored we were in Athens! Stagnation and self-
disgust engender a low fever that lays waste the curiosity and
resolution which might have cured them. The weather was too
bad to go anywhere, and the nearest sun was in Egypt. Sleeping
late to shorten the day, one went to the window and found
the Acropolis and the Parthenon blocking the horizon. A
thing of beauty, that is a joy once or twice, and afterwards
a standing reproach. Downstairs it would be nearly lunch-
time. In the bar, which was an embottled corridor smelling
of gin and Gold Flake, the Greek business men jollied each
other up in cinema American and Trocadero English. The
sombre dining-room was like the Dickensian coffee-room of a
Midland hotel. The French dishes all tasted the same, like
food on a liner; the Greek joints seemed made of sweetened
gelatine. Coffee was served in the lounge amid the engineering
papers, and snatches of conversations.

"I hope you are never troubled by the green-eyed monster."

"Pliss, Mr. Insull?"

"Why, you know what the green-eyed monster is! Jealousy!"

"O yais, Mr. Insull, Pliss?"

A walk in the afternoon. Tram-lines, blocks of yellow houses,
demolition, everywhere the metamorphosis of a tenth-rate
Turkish market town into a tenth-rate Californian suburb.
A pause in the book-shop where one must choose between
expensive art-books on the Acropolis and diseases of the
stomach, or sixpenny editions of Edgar Wallace and Wilhelm
Meister. There were also the newspapers, and glancing at
them phrases would enter with a little stab and begin to
fester. "Ruskin, one felt, would have disapproved," "wherein
promise and achievement touch hands very agreeably," and
"Bébé is painting a portrait of Baba." Before the gossip-

-174-