"One would fancy that a good photograph would be more reliable, as well as cheaper," said the naval officer.
Coulston reproachfully shook his head. "I'm afraid we differ there," he said. "Leaving out the question of colour, a photograph is necessarily an artificial thing. It wants life and atmosphere, and you can never put that into a picture by a mechanical process. Only a man can feel, and transmute his impressions into material. Accuracy of detail is, after all, by comparison, a secondary consideration, but perhaps I had better pull up before my hobby makes a bolt of it."
"I have heard of people riding a hobby uncomfortably hard," said Jacinta reflectively.
"That, I think, is, to be accurate, seldom what happens. If a man has a genuine hobby, it never needs spurring. It is, in fact, unpleasantly apt to run away with him on the smallest provocation. Are steamboat men addicted to making sketches, Mr. Macallister?"
"No," said Macallister, grinning. "At least its not the usual thing, but I once sailed with another of them who did. He was second engineer, and would draw the chief one day. It was very like him, so like that it cost the man his job, and a wife as well. Says he, 'How could ye expect me to idealise a man with a mouth like yon?'"
"But how did that affect his wife?" asked the officer.
Macallister grinned more broadly, but it was Jacinta he looked at.
"Ye see," he said, "he had not got one then. He was second engineer, and would have gone chief in a new boat if he'd stayed with that company. The young woman was ambitious, and she told him she would not marry him until he was promoted, on principle. He was a long while over it after he lost that berth, and then—also on principle—he would not marry her."
Jacinta laughed, though Muriel fancied she had seen a momentary hardening of her face.
"She probably deserved it, though one can't help concluding that she wouldn't feel it much," she said. "That is one of the advantages of being a practical person; but hadn't you better get the drawings out?"