n an important way in the process
of spending and getting their money, taking an Atlantic liner as humbler
people take a tramcar, without giving much thought to it or laying
elaborate plans, running backwards and forwards across the Atlantic and
its dangers as children run across the road in front of a motor car.
They were going to America this week; they would probably come back next
week or the week after. They were the people for whom the _Titanic_ had
specially been designed; it was for them that all the luxuries had been
contrived, so that in their runnings backwards and forwards they should
not find the long days tedious or themselves divorced from the kind of
accompaniments to life which they had come to regard as necessities.

But for the people in the steerage this was no hurrying trip between one
business office and another; no hasty holiday arranged to sandwich ten
thousand miles of ozone as a refresher between two business engagements.
This westward progress was for them part of the drift of their lives,
loosening them from their native soil to scatter and distribute them
over the New World, in the hope that in fresher soil and less crowded
conditions they would strike new roots and begin a new life. The road
they travelled was for most of them a road to be travelled once only, a
road they knew they would never retrace. For them almost exclusively was
reserved that strange sense of looking down over the stern of the ship
into the boiling commotion of the churned-up waters, the maelstrom of
snow under the counter merging into the pale green highway that lay
straight behind them to the horizon, and of knowing that it was a road
that divided them from home, a road that grew a mile longer with every
three minutes of their storming progress. Other ships would follow on
the road; other ships would turn and come again, and drive their way
straight back over the white foam to where, with a sudden plunging and
turning of screws in the green harbour water of home, the road had
begun. But they who looked back from the steerage quarters of the
_Titanic_ would not return; and they, alone of all the passengers on the
ship, knew it.

And that is all we can know or imagine about them; but it is probably
more than most of the fortunate ones on the snowy upper decks cared to
know or imagine. Up there also there were distinctions; some of the
travellers there, for example, were so rich that they were conspicuous
for riches, e