hat, she was a different girl from the girl of the ship. She had been a
winter girl in white fur, then. Now she was a summer girl, and a
radiant vision, twice as pretty as before, especially in this Oriental
frame; still I was waiting to see myself fall in love with her, much in
the same way that Biddy was waiting. And there was that Oriental frame!
It belonged to my past, and perhaps Monny Gilder didn't belong even to
my future, so it was excusable if I thought of it more than of her.

It was hardly nine o'clock, but already the wonderful coloured cinema
show of Cairo daily life had begun to flash and flicker past the
terrace of Shepheard's, where East and West meet and mingle more
sensationally than anywhere in Egypt. Nobody save ourselves had dared
suggest breakfast; but travellers were pouring into the hotel, and
pouring out. Pretty women and plain women were sitting at the little
wicker tables to read letters, or discuss plans for the day with each
other or their dragomans. Officers in khaki came and talked to them
about golf and gymkhanas. Down on the pavement, close under the
balustrade, crowded young and old Egyptian men with dark faces and
wonderful eyes or no eyes at all, struggling to sell painted
post-cards, strings of blue-gray mummy beads; necklaces of cornelian and
great lumps of amber; fans, perfumes, sample sticks of smoking incense,
toy camels cleverly made of jute; fly whisks from the Sudan with
handles of beads and dangling shells; scarab rings and brooches; cheap,
gay jewellery, scarfs from Asiut, white, black, pale green and purple,
glittering like miniature cataracts of silver, as brown arms held them
up. Darting Arab urchins hawked tame ichneumons, or shouted newspapers
for sale--English, American, Greek, French, German, Italian, and
Turkish. Copper-tinted, classic-featured youths in white had golden
crowns of bananas round their turbans; withered patriarchs in blue
galabeahs offered oranges, or immense bunches of mixed flowers, fresh