"Wouldn't it be better to give them some fresh water?" said little Saffy, "that would make them glad." To this wisdom there was no response. When they came to the door of the concert-room, Cornelius turned into it, leaving his "friend" with his "people" to go and look at the fishes. Mr. Vavasor kept his place by the side of Hester. "We were just talking, when we had the pleasure of meeting you, about people and fishes--comparing them in a way," said Hester. "I can't make it clear to myself why I like seeing the fishes better than the people." "I fancy it must be because you call them fishes and not fish," replied Vavasor. "If the fishes were a shoal of herrings or mackerel, I doubt if you would--at least for many times. If, on the other hand, the men and women in the concert-room were as oddly distinguished one from another as these different fishes, you would prefer going with your brother." "I'm sure I shouldn't" said Saffy to Mark. "Phizzes is best on fishes," answered Mark sententiously. "I like faces best; only you don't _always_ want to look at what you like best!--I wonder why." "And yet I suspect," said Mrs. Raymount to Vavasor, "many of the people are as much distinguished from each other in character as the fishes are in form." "Possibly," interjected her husband, "they are as different in their faces also, only we are too much of their kind to be able to read the differences so clearly." "Surely you do not mean," said Vavasor respectfully, "that any two persons in the concert-room can be as much unlike each other as that flounder shuddering along the sandy bottom, and that yard of eel sliding through the water like an embodied wickedness?" Hester was greatly struck with the poetic tone of the remark. "I think you may find people as different," replied her father, "if you take into the account the more delicate as well as the more striking differences--the deeper as well as the surface diversities. Now you make me think of it, I begin to doubt whether all these live grotesques may not have been made to the pattern of different developments of humanity." "Look at that dog-fish," said Vavasor, pointing to the largest in the tank. "What a brute! Don't you hate him, Miss Raymount?" "I am not willing to hate any live thing," answered Hester with a smile, "--from selfish motives, perhaps; I feel as if it would be to my own loss, causing me some kind of irreparable hurt." "But you would kill such a creature as that--would you not?" he rejoined. "In possible circumstances," she answered; "but killing and hating have nothing necessarily to do with each other. He that hates his brother is always a murderer, not always he that kills him." "This is another sort of girl from any I've met yet!" said Vavasor to himself. "I wonder what she's really like!"