"It once occurred to me," he went on, meditatively, "that a good deal of the unreality of people in books is due to the homogeneity of their emotions. A man in love, for example, is in love right to the end, or to the point where the mechanism of the story renders it necessary to introduce another state of affairs. Anybody who has been in love, or cherished a hatred, or espoused a doctrine, or done anything invoking the deep chords, knows that this is not so. There is the reaction. When I got aboard the _Manola_ once more and stood in the middle of my stuffy little cabin on the port side of the engine hatch, I was a cold and discouraged pessimist. The oil lamp on my table showed me my domain. A cockroach was making its way methodically round and round a covered plate of sandwiches, while its brother or possibly a distant relation was enjoying a good tuck-in of the cocoa at the bottom of a cup. Down below I heard the bang of a bucket, and I reflected that the donkeyman, after cleaning his fires and sweeping his tubes, was washing himself in the stoke-hold. The night watchman in the galley was drying heavy flannels over the stove and the warm, offensive odour hung in the air. On the big mirror which I have mentioned, I saw a memorandum written with a piece of soap: 'Steering Gear.' I recalled that I must get the Mate to take up the slack in his tiller-head in the morning. I was overwhelmed with the hard, gritty facts of existence, an existence the most discouraging and drab on earth I imagine, unless one has some fine romantic ideal before one. And I stood there, irresolute, looking at my figure in the glass, which reminded me of a badly painted ancestral portrait, and wondered whether I was capable of a fine romantic ideal. There lies the trouble with most of us, I fancy. We lose our youth and we fail to lay hold of the resolution of manhood. And before we know it we have drifted moodily into forlorn by-ways of sensuality....