y, sentimental pity, real pity, practical pity, for all
the obvious and patent distress of the bereaved and destitute; but there
was no pity for this man who, of all that ragged remnant that walked
back to life down the _Carpathia's_ gangway, had perhaps the most need
of pity.

XVII

The symbols of Honour and Glory and Time that looked so handsome in the
flooding sunlight of the _Titanic's_ stairway lie crushed into
unrecognizable shapes and splinters beneath the tonnage of two thousand
fathoms of ocean water. Time is no more for the fifteen hundred souls
who perished with them; but Honour and Glory, by strange ways and
unlooked-for events, have come into their own. It was not Time, nor the
creatures and things of Time, that received their final crown there; but
things that have nothing to do with Time, qualities that, in their power
of rising beyond all human limitations, we must needs call divine.

The _Titanic_ was in more senses than one a fool's paradise. There is
nothing that man can build that nature cannot destroy, and far as he may
advance in might and knowledge and cunning, her blind strength will
always be more than his match. But men easily forget this; they wish to
forget it; and the beautiful and comfortable and agreeable equipment of
this ship helped them to forget it. You may cover the walls of a ship
with rare woods and upholster them with tapestries and brocades, but it
is the bare steel walls behind them on which you depend to keep out the
water; it is the strength of those walls, relatively to the strength of
such natural forces as may be arrayed against them, on which the safety
of the ship depends. If they are weaker than something which assails
them, the water must come in and the ship must sink. It was assumed too
readily that, in the case of the _Titanic_, these things could not
happen; it was assumed too readily that if in the extreme event they did
happen, the manifold appliances for saving life would be amply
sufficient for the security of the passengers. Thus they lived in a
serene confidence such as no ship's company ever enjoyed before, or will
enjoy again for a long time to come. And there were gathered about them
almost all those accessories of material life which are necessary to the
paradise of fools, and are extremely agreeable to wiser men.

It was this perfect serenity of their condition which made so poignant
the tragedy of their sudden meeting with death--that pale ange