She added after a moment: “Add man to nature, and it stops sulking: which goes to show that fallen humanity is better than no company at all.”
She had an inherent strain of mockery, of playful satire, and she told me once, when I knew her better, that her own suffering always set her laughing at herself, even when it was greatest. It was this characteristic which made her conversation very striking, it was so sharply contrasted in its parts; a heartless kind of satire set against the most serious and acute statements. One never knew when she would turn her own or her interlocutor’s gravity into mirth.
Now no one replied immediately to her remarks, and she continued: “If I were an artist I should wish to paint that scene, given that the lights were not so bright and that mill machinery not so sharply defined. There is almost too much limelight, as it were; too much earnestness in the thing. Either there should be some side-action of mirth to make it less intense, or of tragedy to render it less photographic; and unless, Dr. Marmion, you would consent to be solemn, which would indeed be droll; or that The Padre there--how amusing they should call him that!--should cease to be serious, which, being so very unusual, would be tragic, I do not know how we are to tell the artist that he has missed a chance of immortalising himself.”
Roscoe said nothing, but smiled at her vivacity, while he deprecated her words by a wave of his hand. I also was silent for a moment; for there had come to my mind, while she was speaking and I was watching the scene, something that Hungerford had said to me once on board the ‘Fulvia’. “Marmion,” said he, “when everything at sea appears so absolutely beautiful and honest that it thrills you, and you’re itching to write poetry, look out. There’s trouble ahead. It’s only the pretty pause in the happy scene of the play before the villain comes in and tumbles things about. When I’ve been on the bridge,” he continued, “of a night that set my heart thumping, I knew, by Jingo! it was the devil playing his silent overture. Don’t you take in the twaddle about God sending thunderbolts; it’s that old war-horse down below.--And then I’ve kept a sharp lookout, for I knew as right as rain that a company of waterspouts would be walking down on us, or a hurricane racing to catch us broadsides. And what’s gospel for sea is good for land, and you’ll find it so, my son.”