The impression to be conveyed by this scene is one of the beautiful, vivid life of the sea all about—sunshine on the deck in a great flood, the fresh sea wind blowing across it. In the midst of this, these two incongruous, artificial figures, inert and disharmonious, the elder like a gray lump of dough touched up with rouge, the younger looking as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived, so that she is the expression not of its life energy but merely of the artificialities that energy had won for itself in the spending.
MILDRED—[Looking up with affected dreaminess.] How the black smoke swirls back against the sky! Is it not beautiful?
AUNT—[Without looking up.] I dislike smoke of any kind.
MILDRED—My great-grandmother smoked a pipe—a clay pipe.
AUNT—[Ruffling.] Vulgar!
MILDRED—She was too distant a relative to be vulgar. Time mellows pipes.
AUNT—[Pretending boredom but irritated.] Did the sociology you took up at college teach you that—to play the ghoul on every possible occasion, excavating old bones? Why not let your great-grandmother rest in her grave?
MILDRED—[Dreamily.] With her pipe beside her—puffing in Paradise.
AUNT—[With spite.] Yes, you are a natural born ghoul. You are even getting to look like one, my dear.
MILDRED—[In a passionless tone.] I detest you, Aunt. [Looking at her critically.] Do you know what you remind me of? Of a cold pork pudding against a background of linoleum tablecloth in the kitchen of a—but the possibilities are wearisome. [She closes her eyes.]