ABSTRACT
The rumour was founded on fact — and my pitying superiority of Friday has returned, like any common boomerang, to humiliate myself. e dance last night was fairly strongly patronized, and apparently popular. But, you ask, what is the good of maundering on in an infantile and futile e ort to portray life on board a liner? It has all been written before, billions of times; there is nothing new to relate, nothing further to explore. True, but as a rejected aspirant to conjugal bliss once remarked, on being advised to console himself in a life of exploration: there is nothing le nowadays to explore except the end of the Cromwell Road. So, having, as it were, taken the weary sighing winds out of your mental sails, I shall carry on. e day is another peep of a marine paradise; the sea sparkles in the clear sunshine; on the far horizon banked-up clouds as of lately fallen snow poise themselves (as a background of fantastically devised mountains) above the sunlit sea; and one’s study of nature is suddenly interrupted by the deck steward’s administrations of beef-tea and biscuits. Indeed one is sometimes inclined on board ship to describe one’s regular and legitimate meals in the same language as a retired native Indian o cial once characterized his pay, as “but the chutni which we eat with our meat.”
