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‘Careful,’ she whispered.’Mrs Worden, who’s supposed to be chaperoning me, is across the way. She’s sick.’

‘I’m sick for you.’

They kissed suddenly, clung close together in the narrow corridor, swaying to and fro with the motion of the ship.

‘Don’t go away,’ she murmured.

‘I’ve got to. I’ve–‘

Her youth seemed to flow into him, bearing him up into a delicate romantic ecstasy that transcended passion. He couldn’t relinquish it; he had discovered something that he had thought was lost with his own youth forever. As he walked along the passage he knew that he had stopped thinking, no longer dared to think.

He met Eva going into the bar.

‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked with a strained smile.

‘To see about the table.’

She was lovely; her cool distinction conquered the trite costume and filled him with a resurgence of approval and pride. They sat down at a table.

The gale was rising hour by hour and the mere traversing of a passage had become a rough matter. In every stateroom trunks were lashed to the washstands, and the Vestrisdisaster was being reviewed in detail by nervous ladies, tossing, ill and wretched, upon their beds. In the smoking-room a stout gentleman had been hurled backward and suffered a badly cut head; and now the lighter cha
irs and tables were stacked and roped against the wall.

The crowd who had donned fancy dress and were dining together had swollen to about sixteen. The only remaining qualification for membership was the ability to reach the smoking-room. They ranged from a Groton-Harvard lawyer to an ungrammatical broker they had nicknamed Gyp the Blood, but distinctions had disappeared; for the moment they were samurai, chosen from several hundred for their triumphant resistance to the storm.

The gala dinner, overhung sardonically with lanterns and streamers, was interrupted by great communal slides across the room, precipitate retirements and spilled wine, while the ship roared and complained that under the panoply of a palace it was a ship after all. Upstairs afterward a dozen couples tried to dance, shuffling and galloping here and there in a crazy fandango, thrust around fantastically by a will alien to their own. In view of the condition of tortured hundreds below, there grew to be something indecent about it like a revel in a house of mourning, and presently there was an egress of the ever-dwindling survivors towards the bar.

As the evening passed, Eva’s feeling of unreality increased. Adrian had disappeared–presumably with Miss D’Amido–and her mind, distorted by illness and champagne, began to enlarge upon the fact; annoyance changed slowly to dark and brooding anger, grief to desperation. She had never tried to bind Adrian, never needed to–for they were serious people, with all sorts of mutual interests, and satisfied with each other–but this was a breach of the contract, this was cruel. How could he think that she didn’t know?

It seemed several hours later that he leaned over her chair in the bar where she was giving some woman an impassioned lecture upon babies, and said:

‘Eva, we’d better turn in.’

Her lip curled.’So that you can leave me there and then come back to your eighteen-year–‘

‘Be quiet.’

‘I won’t come to bed.’

‘Very well. Good night.’

More time passed and the people at the table changed. The stewards wanted to close up the room, and thinking of Adrian–her Adrian–off somewhere saying tender things to someone fresh and lovely, Eva began to cry.

‘But he’s gone to bed,’ her last attendants assured her.’We saw him go.’

She shook her head. She knew better. Adrian was lost. The long seven-year dream was broken. Probably she was punished for something she had done; as this thought occurred to her the shrieking timbers overhead began to mutter that she had guessed at last. This was for the selfishness to her mother, who hadn’t wanted her to marry Adrian; for all the sins and omissions of her life. She stood up, saying she must go out and get some air.