There

“Let me tell you something about the Busbys,” the old gentleman said to me. “The Busbys don’t wash themselves—not adequately. And especially not as they grow older.”

That was how he opened our last conversation. It was our last meeting aboard ship, and the last he and I will be likely to have in this world. He was the kind of shipboard acquaintance you make who never seems real afterward. You remember him more distinctly than you do someone you have met on a plane or a train, but it is only because you were with him for a longer time. Nowadays particularly, there seems something unreal about people you have known on a sea voyage. To me, at least, it is nearly always as though I have met some character out of the past or out of a novel. And I never know whether it seems stranger when they do or when they don’t explain why they are traveling by ship instead of by plane. In any case, the odd thing was that this man was a shipboard acquaintance who had come originally from my own hometown, and it was of people back there he was speaking, not of our fellow passengers. We two had grown up in the same inland city, and we came more or less from the same stock there; yet the thirty or forty years that separated us made us strangers to one another as no distance across the surface of the earth nowadays, and no difference in nationality, could possibly have. … At least so it seemed to me at the time. And nothing could have amused me more than his assumption that I would be acquainted with the same families that had once so absorbed his interest.