“He looked down at the rose in his other hand, its neck drooping like a tubercular heroine’s, and felt abruptly and horribly sorry for it: for the fact that it had been grown somewhere, fed and watered and nurtured, and cut and brought all the way here to this airport to be bought and given to someone, to make them smile, and here it was with him instead, dying in his hand. Thwarted of its purpose. Its small brief life all wasted.”
