Overdue and Missing

p.66. Excerpt reads: "Only a very few days more - appallingly few to the hearts which had set themselves bravely to hope against hope - three weeks, a month later, perhaps, the name of ships under the blight of the Overdue heading shall appear again in the column of Shipping Intelligence, but under the final declaration of Missing. Perhaps the men she carried had asked her to do too much, had stretched beyond breaking-point the enduring faithfulness which seems wrought and hammered into that assemblage of iron ribs and plating, of wood and steel and canvas and wire, which goes to the making of a ship - a complete creation endowed with character, individuality, qualities and defects, by men whose hands launch her upon the water, and that other men shall learn to know with an intimacy surpassing the intimacy of man with man, to love with a love nearly as great as that of man for woman, and often as blind in its infatuated disregard of defects."