"He must change," said Hester.
Then first Vavasor began to feel the conversation getting quite too serious.
"Ah, well!" he said. "But don't you think this is rather—ah—rather—don't you know?—for an aquarium?"
Hester did not reply. Nothing was too serious for her in any place. She was indeed a peculiar girl—the more the pity for the many that made her so!
"Let us go and see the octopus," said Vavasor.
They went, and Mr. Raymount slowly followed them. He had not heard the last turn of their conversation.
"You two have set me thinking," he said, when he joined them; "and brought to my mind an observation I had made—how seldom you find art succeed in representing the hatefully ugly! The painter can accumulate ugliness, but I do not remember a demon worth the name. The picture I can best recall with demons in it is one of Raphael's—a St. Michael slaying the dragon—from the Purgatorio, I think, but I am not sure; not one of the demons in that picture is half so ugly as your dog-fish.—What if it be necessary that we should have lessons in ugliness?"
"But why?" said Hester. "Is not the ugly better let alone? You have always taught that ugliness is the natural embodiment of evil!"
"Because we have chosen what is bad, and do not know how ugly it is—that is why," answered her father.
"Isn't that rather hard on the fish, though?" said Vavasor. "How can innocent creatures be an embodiment of evil?"