But supposing it wasn't, we're doing something like it every day and every moment of our lives.

The Norumbia is a piece of the whole world's civilization set afloat, and passing from shore to shore with unchanged classes, and conditions.

A ship's merely a small stage, where we're brought to close quarters with the daily drama of humanity." "Well, then," she protested, "I don't like being brought to close quarters with the daily drama of humanity, as you call it.

And I don't believe that the large English ships are built so that the steerage passengers can stare in at the saloon windows while one is eating; and I'm sorry we came on the Norumbia." "Ah, you think the Norumbia doesn't hide anything," he began, and he was going to speak of the men in the furnace pits of the steamer, how they fed the fires in a welding heat, and as if they had perished in it crept out on the forecastle like blanched phantasms of toil; but she interposed in time.
"If there's anything worse, for pity's sake don't tell me," she entreated, and he forebore.
He sat thinking how once the world had not seemed to have even death in it, and then how as he had grown older death had come into it more and more, and suffering was lurking everywhere, and could hardly be kept out of sight.

He wondered if that young Burnamy now saw the world as he used to see it, a place for making verse and making love, and full of beauty of all kinds waiting to be fitted with phrases.