alone would never indicate her position in life. MILDRED is
dressed all in white.

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?