Marise went on, drawing breath for a longer flight. "When the train comes sweeping up the valley, trailing its great beautiful banner of smoke, I feel as though it were the crescendo announcing something, and at the crossing, when that noble rounded note blares out . . . why, it's the music for the setting. Nothing else could cope with the depth of the valley, the highness and blackness of its mountain walls, and the steepness of the Eagle Rocks."
"I call that going some, 'noble rounded note'!" murmured Marsh, lifting his eyebrows with a visible effort and letting his eyes fall half shut, against the brilliance of the sunshine.
Marise laughed, and persisted. "Just because its called a steam-whistle, we won't hear its beauty and grandeur, till something else has been invented to take its place, and then we'll look back sentimentally and regret it."
"Maybe you will," conceded Marsh.
The two elder looked on, idly amused at this give-and-take.
"And I don't suppose," continued Marise, "to take another instance of modern lack of imagination, that you have ever noticed, as an element of picturesque power in modern life, the splendid puissance of the traffic cop's presence in a city street."
They all had a protesting laugh at this, startled for an instant from their dreaminess.
"Yes, and if I could think of more grandiloquent words to express him, I'd use them," said Marise defiantly, launching out into yet more outrageous flights of rhetoric. "I could stand for hours on a street corner, admiring the completeness with which he is transfigured out of the human limitations of his mere personality, how he feels, flaming through his every vein and artery, the invincible power of THE LAW, freely set over themselves by all those turbulent, unruly human beings, surging around him in their fiery speed-genii. He raises his arm. It is not a human arm, it is the decree of the entire race. And as far as it can be seen, all those wilful fierce creatures bow themselves to it. The current boils past him in one direction. He lets it go till he thinks fit to stop it. He sounds his whistle, and raises his arm again in that inimitable gesture of omnipotence. And again they bow themselves. Now that the priest before the altar no longer sways humanity as he did, is there anywhere else, any other such visible embodiment of might, majesty, and power as . . ."
"Gracious me, Marise!" warned her old cousin. "I know you're only running on with your foolishness, but I think you're going pretty far when you mix a policeman up with priests and altars and things. I don't believe Mr. Bayweather would like that very well."
"He wouldn't mind," demurred Marise. "He'd think it an interesting historical parallel."