I met the next day another officer whose mustache and eyebrows were black as jet, but whose hair was silver white. He was thirty-eight years old. For six years and a half he had been a submarine officer, he told me.
"Why did you quit it?" I asked him.
"Too old," he said.
"Is there an age limit?" I asked.
"No," he replied, "but a man knows when he is too old for the work."
Yet nothing would induce those who have not yet found themselves too old to leave it. One would think the sailors, at any rate, would find the life tiresome or too dangerous. I talked to several of them about it, but they all agreed that they would not change.
"Is this life better than on a battleship?" I asked one sailor.
"Oh, yes," he replied. "I would not go back to a battleship."
"What makes it better?" I asked.
"It is more tranquil," he answered.