to-day you can't get done to-morrow."

Nevertheless, it proved to be a very human world, a world in which the
personal equation counted. I remember that while some four hundred in
one long hall were applauding "Home, Sweet Home," very badly fiddled by
a gay man on a stool ("Home, Sweet Home"--and half of them
Scandinavians!), and another four hundred or so were sitting expectant
on those multifarious convenient staircases or wandering in and out of
the maze of cubicles that contained fifteen hundred separate berths, and
a third four hundred or so in another long hall were consuming a huge
tea offered to them by a cohort of stewards in white--I remember that
while all this was going forward and the complex mechanism of the
kitchen was in full strain a little, untidy woman, with an infant
dragging at one hand and a mug in the other, strolled nonchalantly into
the breathless kitchen, and said to a hot cook, "Please will you give me
a drop o' milk for this child?" And under the military gaze of the high
officer, too! Something awful should have happened. The engines ought to
have stopped. The woman ought to have been ordered out to instant
execution. The engines did seem to falter for a moment. But the high
officer grimly smiled, and they went on again. "Give me yer mug,
mother," said the cook. And the untidy woman went off with her booty.

"Now I'll show you the first-class kitchens," the high officer said, and
guided me through uncharted territories to chambers where spits were
revolving in front of intense heat, and where a confectionery business
proceeded, night and day, and dough was mixed by electricity, and
potatoes peeled by the same, and where a piece of clockwork lifted an
egg out of boiling water after it had lain therein the number of seconds
prescribed by you. And there, pinned to a board, was the order I had
given for a special dinner that night. And there, too, more impressive