'Then I give up attempting to understand human nature!'
'I gave that up years ago, Brenda.'
She did not answer him, but sat gazing across the dark waters with an unsatisfied expression upon her sweet, intellectual face. Even as that gray, hopeless sheet of water, life lay before her—a surface, and nothing else; a knowledge that there was something beneath that surface, a hot, fierce thirst to drink deeper of the cup of knowledge; to know more and find a reason for many things which to our minds are quite unreasonable: and no means of satisfying what is, after all, a natural and legitimate craving.
'It is no use,' continued Trist in a lighter tone, 'attempting to understand anything, because sooner or later you will find yourself confronted by a great wall which no knowledge can surmount.'
'We either know too much or too little,' said the girl discontentedly.
'Too much,' he affirmed without any hesitation. 'Fortunately, we have learnt to acquire a mental courage with our knowledge, or else we never would be able to face life at all.'
After this there was a pause of some duration. It would be impossible to hazard a guess at what thoughts were passing through the man's brain as he sat there blandly indifferent, placid and utterly inscrutable. His meek eyes wore no far-off, absent look. He seemed merely to be noting the shadows upon the water.
With her it was different. Plainly, she was thinking of him, for her eyes were fixed upon his face, endeavouring to decipher something there. At last, as with a sudden effort, she spoke, and in the inconsistency, the utter irrelevancy of her speech, there was the history of a woman's world.
'Either,' she said in a dull voice, 'you are on the verge of atheism, or you love Alice. Only one of those ... calamities could account for the utter hopelessness of your creed.'
At this moment Mrs. Wylie appeared on deck, and playfully chided them for staying away so long.