The office force left pretty promptly on the hour. When Mamise noted that desks were being cleared for inaction she began mechanically to conform. Then she paused. On other afternoons she had gone home with the crowd of employees, too weary with office routine to be discontent. But now she thought of Davidge left alone in his office to brood over his lost ship, the brutal mockery of such loving toil. It seemed heartless to her as his friend to desert him in the depths. But as one of his stenographers, it would look shameless to hang round with the boss. She shifted from foot to foot and from resolve to resolve. Their relations were undergoing as many strains and stresses as a ship's frame in the various waves and weathers that confront it. She had picked up some knowledge of the amazing twists a ship encounters at rest and in motion--stresses in still water, with cargo and without, hogging and sagging stresses, seesaw strains, tensile, compressive, transverse, racking, pounding; bumps, blows, collisions, oscillations, running aground--stresses that crumpled steel or scissored the rivets in two. It was hard to foresee the critical stress that should mean life or death to the ship and its people. Some went humbly forth and came home with rich cargo; some steamed out in pride and never came back; some limped in from the sea racked and ruined; some ran stupidly ashore in fogs; some fought indomitably through incredible tempests. Some died dramatic deaths on cliffs where tidal waves hammered them to shreds; some turned turtle at their docks and went down in the mud. Some led long and honorable lives, and others, beginning with glory, degenerated into cattle-ships or coastal tramps. People were but ships and bound for as many destinations and destinies. Their fates depended as much and yet as little on their pilots and engineers, their engines and their frames. The test of the ship and of the person was the daily drudgery and the unforeseen emergency. Davidge believed in preliminary tests of people and boats. Before he hired a man or trusted a partner he inquired into his past performances. He had been unable to insist on investigation in the recent mad scramble for labor due to the sudden withdrawal into the national army of nearly every male between twenty-one and thirty-one and of hundreds of thousands of volunteers of other ages. He had given his heart to Marie Louise Webling, of whom he knew little except that she would not tell him much. And on her dubious voucher he had taken Jake Nuddle into his employ. Now he had to accept them as he had to accept steel, taking it as it came and being glad to get any at all.