The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

We saw each other for the first time, drinking bad South African sherry because of the war in Spain. I noticed Sarah, I think, because she was happy: in those years the sense of happiness had been a long while dying under the coming storm. One detected it in drunken people, in children, seldom elsewhere. I liked her at once because she said she had read my books and left the subject there—I found myself treated at once as a human being rather than as an author. I had no idea whatever of falling in love with her. For one thing, she was beautiful, and beautiful women, especially if they are intelligent also, stir some deep feeling of inferiority in me. I don’t know whether psychologists have yet named the Cophetua complex, but I have always found it hard to feel sexual desire without some sense of superiority, mental or physical. All I noticed about her that first time was her beauty and her happiness and her way of touching people with her hands, as though she loved them. I can only recall one thing she said to me, apart from that statement with which she began—‘You do seem to dislike a lot of people.’ Perhaps I had been talking smartly about my fellow writers. I don’t remember.