‘Oh, they like a naval man,’ said Jim; ‘their uniform gives them a little dignity, don’t you know, whereas I’m nobody.’ ‘But it is the same in everything. You can’t be somebody all at once. You must begin low down,’ said Mab, bending her little person over her oar with that slow, steady stroke which confused Florence. Florry was choppy and irregular--one time slow, the next fast; never able to hit the time which Mab gave her with such steady composure. ‘The way to do,’ said Mab, ‘is to put everything else out of your head, as long as you are able to, and think of nothing but that. You should never mind what you like, or what you want, but just set your thoughts on what you are doing. Look at Florry; she wants to hear what we’re saying, and she wants to defend you, Jim, that I mayn’t say anything unpleasant; and the consequence is that if you were not steering against me with all your might, I should pull the boat round and round.’ ‘Florry is only a girl, and a bad specimen,’ said Jim. ‘You should have let me pull, and then you’d have seen something like pulling.’ ‘I am only a girl myself,’ said Mab. ‘But, then, you’re a good specimen,’ said the young man, with a laugh. ‘You keep your eyes in the boat.’ ‘Which is what you don’t do, Jim!’ ‘How do you know, you little thing, lecturing people older than yourself? I may not with Sophocles--but I do with other things.’ ‘Which other things?’ said Mab. But Jim made no reply; and here Florry interposed again with strokes shorter and more irregular than ever, to talk over her cousin’s shoulder, and ask, though they were not half-way to the island, or even to the lock for that matter, whether it would be better to turn back and go home. They lay for a moment in midstream. Mab pausing on her steady oar to remonstrate, making a picture in the water, the boat floating as a bird floats in mid air, between the sky and the river, which reflected every line of cloud and stretch of blue. Some cows at the water’s edge stood double, feeding, on the very brink, and the trees still bare, but all downy with life, pushing out a greenness here and there, seemed to stretch out of the water in reflection to meet the others on the bank. Watcham lay glorified, one white house above the rest lighting up all the river with its white shadow in the stream. The boat lay like a thing enchanted with the three figures shining in afternoon light, above and below. VII