“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 instincts.  It is loathsome to me.  And their clumsy phrases revealing the indifference, the obtuseness of their souls make me shudder.  In their eyes I see that calm selfish sense of their own security to the damage of another person’s security which is at the bottom of a murderous madness that I myself experienced.  Those men are cold men, they are murderous men.  And a brutal state of self-defence but slightly veiled and suppressed is their permanent state.”

“Your friends, it seems to me, must have behaved very badly,” Miss Burns said, laughing.

To this Frederick could not truthfully assent.  He merely repeated: 

“The way I feel about it is that they have taken the ship between their teeth, the ship with all its timber and iron and its immense human cargo, and chewed it to a pulp, and swallowed it down without leaving a trace behind.”  He removed his hat and ran his fingers through his hair.

“If you really do wish to lunch with me, Doctor von Kammacher, you must not have high-flown notions, like Mr. Ritter,” said Miss Burns halting in front of a tidy little restaurant.

They entered a low room with a red brick floor and panelled walls and ceiling.  Owing to the enormous timber resources of their country, the Americans make a very free, though refined use of wood.  The clean little room was frequented by German barbers, riding-masters, coachmen, and clerks.  An inexpensive lunch and the usual American drinks were dispensed at the bar.  The corner where the proprietor sat was decorated with a small collection of sporting pictures, well-known jockeys with their horses, acrobats, and baseball champions.  Something in his appearance suggested that at night he had different customers to deal with than in the daytime, that his athletic figure—­he was neatly dressed, but in his shirt sleeves—­was meant to inspire respect in his clients.  Frederick still suffered from too much breeding, and he was secretly astonished that Eva Burns ventured into such a place.