The upper classes are depicted as heavy drinkers. The ship workers in Ireland are frequently drunk on duty. Hopper is drunk when he injures Morgan playing racquetball. Embarrassed by the drunken spectacle he makes of himself after the Scurra-Wallis tryst, Morgan vows never to repeat it. He accepts a drink when his turn-around is toasted, for to refuse would be rude, and he takes a medicinal brandy to revive him from a faint. He is happy that for the most part he manages to break the habit, though. He observes that sobriety has a hallucinatory effect of its own. Captain Smith never drinks, Morgan observes, while talking with the steward about the skipper's extraordinary seamanship. The cause and effect seems obvious.
The stranger who dies in Morgan's arms at the beginning of the story becomes.....
