The next car has a Greek number plate. It is a hired car from Athens with a more or less uniformed driver and a Greek woman guide in front, and a couple, who seem to be Danish, in the back. The driver parks carefully in his assigned place, then leaps out to help his passengers. The Danish couple and the Greek guide speak French among themselves. The Greek lady is pleasant, handsome, middle-aged, and wears that slightly sad look of misplaced cultivation that guides inevitably acquire. Her hair, iron gray, is tied up in a loose knot; her cotton dress is dark blue.

Her clients the Danes are elegant, sympathetic, refined. The lady wears her graying blond hair in teased, fashionable curls. Her white piqué suit has been ironed that morning, and her nails painted the night before. Nothing could be fresher or more welcome on the deck of a ferry than she. She carries in her arms a big bouquet of the thyme whose purple flowers can be seen on all the surrounding hills. She is charming and gay and greets the deckhands in French, as if they were part of international society. (Her husband is about to correct her when one of them returns a courteous “Bonjour.”) The husband is of middle height and middle years; his yellow hair is thinning, his well-made body thickening. His face is unlined, but experienced, amused. He wears a white shirt and linen trousers, and carries his jacket on his arm. He has the personableness of intelligence, and the little party is no sooner on deck than he resumes his discussion with the guide.

Now comes a Greek farmer with a boy of about ten, wheeling two loaded sacks in a handcart. Now a wiry sunburned woman with a chicken in a wicker basket, a frail elderly couple with a clumsy bundle wrapped in cloth, and four young people—three girls and a youth—in dark clothes, possibly on their way to a family funeral. These people are soon deployed throughout the ship—leaning on the rail near the cars or spreading their parcels over benches on the upstairs deck, or strolling about to chat with the crew. The whistle is blown again, and the green water around the ship is lightly churned.