“Yes. Do you admire it?”
“Very much indeed. It is a beautiful place. Every one must acknowledge that.”
“It is considered kind to praise my house to me, and to ridicule it to other people. You do not say, ‘Hang what it is considered,’ now.”
Cashel, with an unaccustomed sense of getting the worst of an encounter, almost lost heart to reply. Then he brightened, and said, “I can tell you how that is. As far as being a place to sketch, or for another person to look at, it is Chinese enough. But somehow your living in it makes a difference. That is what I meant; upon my soul it is.”
Lydia smiled; but he, looking down at her, did not see the smile because of her coronet of red hair, which seemed to flame in the sunlight. The obstruction was unsatisfactory to him; he wanted to see her face. He hesitated, and then sat down on the ground beside her cautiously, as if getting into a very hot bath.
“I hope you won’t mind my sitting here,” he said, timidly. “It seems rude to talk down at you from a height.”
She shook her head and threw two more stones into the pool. He could think of nothing further to say, and as she did not speak, but gravely watched the circles in the water, he began to stare at them too; and they sat in silence for some minutes, steadfastly regarding the waves, she as if there were matter for infinite thought in them, and he as though the spectacle wholly confounded him. At last she said,
“Have you ever realized what a vibration is?”
“No,” said Cashel, after a blank look at her.
“I am glad to hear you make that admission. Science has reduced everything nowadays to vibration. Light, sound, sensation—all the mysteries of nature are either vibrations or interference of vibrations. There,” she said, throwing another pair of pebbles in, and pointing to the two sets of widening rings as they overlapped one another; “the twinkling of a star, and the pulsation in a chord of music, are THAT. But I cannot picture the thing in my own mind. I wonder whether the hundreds of writers of text-books on physics, who talk so glibly of vibrations, realize them any better than I do.”