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 even than that order, was a list of the several hundred stewards, together with a designation of the post of each in case of casualty.  I noticed that thirty or forty of them were told off “to control passengers.”  After all, we were in the midst of the Atlantic, and in a crisis the elevator-boys themselves would have more authority than any passenger, however gorgeous.  A thought salutary for gorgeous passengers—­that they were in the final resort mere fool bodies to be controlled!  After I had seen the countless store-rooms, in the recesses of each of which was hidden a clerk with a pen behind his ear and a nervous and taciturn air, and passed on to the world of the second cabin, which was a surprisingly brilliant imitation of the great world of the saloon, I found that I held a much-diminished opinion of the great world of the saloon, which I now perceived to be naught but a thin crust or artificial gewgaw stuck over the truly thrilling parts of the ship.