The
former is a girl of twenty, slender, delicate, with a pale, pretty
face marred by a self-conscious expression of disdainful
superiority. She looks fretful, nervous and discontented, bored by
her own anemia. Her aunt is a pompous and proud--and fat--old
lady. She is a type even to the point of a double chin and
lorgnettes. She is dressed pretentiously, as if afraid her face
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.
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