"I can scarcely see them as it is," she answered.
"What is their story?" he went on. "It will be told because they will be saved. Yonder is one of the teachings of the sea. You pass a piece of wreck; it is encrusted with the jewelry of the ocean; it is girdled by a silver belt of fish. To one man it is a piece of wreckage; to another man it is a memorial, lofty, sublime, and awful as a cathedral, of fire, of explosion, of the beam-ended fabric with lashed figures in the shrouds, sunk to the foam, and blackening it with emergence like the iron shape dangling at the finger of a gibbet upon a wintry moor that foams with snow."
"Do all sailors talk in this language?" said Julia.
"Any man who can make himself understood speaks well. I do not love irony."
Julia smiled archly.
"You do not love irony," she said. "Did you ever love another before you loved me?"
"A man who uses the sea is shy amongst women," he answered. "We are accustomed when we see a green eye in thick weather winking off our port bow to sing these lines:
"'There's not so much for you to do,
For green to port keeps clear of you.'
I was never yet in a collision—I mean ashore."
This pleased her, and she said she would go and look to the galley fire if Hardy would kindly hold the wheel.