waters and saw him standing on the bridge,
he seemed to me to be an instrument of God, if not an archangel.
Awe-inspiring repose, solemn, awe-inspiring grandeur rested upon him. He
was not _a_ man, he was _the_ man, the saviour man, and beside him there
was none. My soul, all of our souls, clamoured for him, worshipped him.
But here he has dwindled into nothing but a good, commonplace little
workman. On the trip, Stoss's liveliness was a relief. Now, in the
treadmill of his daily occupation, he has turned from the finer thoughts
of his leisure moments. Duty, while deepening Captain Butor and
temporarily converting him into a useful, even an important personage,
acts as a leveller on Stoss. Stoss merely seemed to partake in the life
on the sea, while in actuality concerned with nothing but himself. And
there's my colleague, the ship's surgeon. I was completely upset to find
what an empty vessel he is. I really thought he was more interesting." As
if sluices in his being had been opened wide, Frederick began to speak
freely of the shipwreck, to which he had never before more than merely
alluded.

"What particularly frightened me to-day was the fact that a man can, as
it were, digest an oak-tree twice within less than forty-eight hours. I
keep discovering myself in the act of doubting the wreck of that giant
steamer, every corner of which was familiar to me. I saw something, but
I am so infinitely remote from it that I still cannot grasp it. I am only
just beginning to feel the ship coming to life in my soul. Four or five
times within the past twenty-four hours, I experienced the whole accident
over again. Last night I started up actually bathed in cold sweat, and
did not know where I was. The confusion on board, the tooting of the
distress signals, the bloody, distorted faces, the floating human limbs,
all was so frightfully appalling. If I keep on seeing such visions, I'll
go down with the _Roland_ again.

"It may be morbid to feel as I do. A man in my condition may say to
himself, 'Go down and stay down, if once you have sunk.' But those people
who got into the car do not even say that, Miss Burns. The whole thing
has gone down for them once for all. They have digested the whole of the
_Roland_ and everything that happened to the hundreds of human beings it
was carrying. They have digested the whole affair and almost forgotten
it. That ability of theirs, enviable though it may be, insults my general
humanitarian insti