Monday, February 16, 2015

Opening paragraphs..................................

Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men and found themselves with less in common then they had believed they had.  Rutherford wrote novels;  Wyland was one of the Embassy secretaries;  he had just given us dinner at Tempelhof - not very cheerfully, I fancied, but with the equanimity which a diplomat must always keep on tap for such occasions.  It seemed likely that nothing but the fact of being three celibate Englishmen in a foreign capital could have brought us together, and I had already reached the conclusion that the slight touch of priggishness which I remembered in Wyland Tertius had not diminished with the years and an M.V.O. Rutherford I liked more;  he had ripened well out of the skinny, precocious infant whom I had once alternately bullied and patronized.  The probability that he was making much more money and having a more interesting life than either of us, gave Wyland and me our one mutual emotion - a touch of envy.
-James Hilton,  Lost Horizon

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