At such a time, the companionship of others palls on one.  It is well then to retire to the privacy of one’s stateroom and recline awhile.  I did a good deal of reclining, coming back; I was not exactly happy while reclining, but I was happier than I would have been doing anything else.  Besides, as I reclined there on my cosy bed, a medley of voices would often float in to me through the half-opened port and I could visualize the owners of those voices as they sat ranged in steamer chairs, along the deck.  I quote: 

“You, Raymund!  You get down off that rail this minute.” ...  “My dear, you just ought to go to mine!  He never hesitates a minute about operating, and he has the loveliest manners in the operating room.  Wait a minute—­I’ll write his address down for you.  Yes, he is expensive, but very, very thorough.” ...  “Stew’d, bring me nozher brand’ ‘n’ sozza.” ...  “Well, now Mr.—­excuse me, I didn’t catch your name?—­oh yes, Mr. Blosser; well, Mr. Blosser, if that isn’t the most curious thing!  To think of us meeting away out here in the middle of the ocean and both of us knowing Maxie Hockstein in Grand Rapids.  It only goes to show one thing—­this certainly is a mighty small world.” ...  “Raymund, did you hear what I said to you!” ...  “Do you really think it is becoming?  Thank you for saying so.  That’s what my husband always says.  He says that white hair with a youthful face is so attractive, and that’s one reason why I’ve never touched it up.  Touched-up hair is so artificial, don’t you think?” ...  “Wasn’t the Bay of Naples just perfectly swell—­the water, you know, and the land and the sky and everything, so beautiful and everything?” ...  “You Raymund, come away from that lifeboat.  Why don’t you sit down there and behave yourself and have a nice time watching for whales?” ...  “No, ma’am, if you’re askin’ me I must say I didn’t care so much for that art gallery stuff—­jest a lot of pictures and statues and junk like that, so far as I noticed.  In fact the whole thing—­Yurupp itself —­was considerable of a disappointment to me.  I didn’t run acros’t a single Knights of Pythias Lodge the whole time and I was over there five months straight hard-runnin’.” ...  “Really, I think it must be hereditary; it runs in our family.  I had an aunt and her hair was snow-white at twenty-one and my grandmother was the same way.” ...  “Oh yes, the suffering is something terrible.  You’ve had it yourself in a mild form and of course you know.  The last time they operated on me, I was on the table an hour and forty minutes—­mind you, an hour and forty minutes by the clock—­and for three days and nights they didn’t know whether I would live another minute.”

A crash of glass.