VB ToY

[Michael Bailey]

from _Testament of Youth_ by Vera Brittain (pen name of prolific
feminist and pacifist
author & speaker, remarkable book)

on her attendance at a League of Nations meeting -
"Among the delegates, seated at their desks in accordance with the French
alphabetical order of the nations, the chief place belonged, as
always, to Dr Nansen,
once the intrepid explorer and hero of every schoolchild, but now, in his
vigorous old age, the friend of prisoners and the hope of refugees.
The indefinable
quality which set him above his fellows seemed to belong less to his
tall, conspicuous figure,
with its lean, melancholy face beneath the broad-brimmed hat of grey
felt, than to his
long swift step and the air of untrammeled freedom which an English
woman journalist
described to me as "the sleigh-dog manner."  The Scandinavian women who often
accompanied him to committees, the dark, mustachioed Bulgarians and
Yugo-Slavs from the
Balkan peninsula, the olive-skinned South Americans from the Spanish Republics,
the yellow, impassive little Japanese and Chinamen from farthest Asia,
together provided
sufficient racial contasts to stock an international personalities
exhibition (*** major
flashback to the 1893 White City, do you feel it? ***) ;
but even among them the leader of the newly admitted Abyssinian delegation,
Dedjazinatch Nadeon, challenged journalistic attention with his
flowing fur-trimmed
cloak covering a white satin tunic and his long thin legs encased in white satin
pyjama-like trousers, the whole being crowned with a very small grey
Homburg hat."