"How can he be made for it if he does not do it?" insisted Vavasor. "How indeed? That is the puzzle," she answered. "If he were not capable there would be none." "I should do better, I am sure, if I could," said Vavasor. Had he known himself, he ought to have added, "without trouble." "Then you think we are all just like the dog-fish--except that destiny has made none of us quite so ugly," rejoined Hester. "Or so selfish," implemented Vavasor. "That I can't see," returned Hester. "If we are merely borne helpless hither and thither on the tide of impulse, we can be neither more nor less selfish than the dog-fish. We are, in fact, neither selfish nor unselfish. We are pure nothings, concerning which speculation is not worth the trouble. But the very word _selfish_ implies a contrary judgment on the part of humanity itself." "Then you believe we can make ourselves different from what we are made?" "Yes; we are made with the power to change. We are meant to take a share in our own making. We are made so and so, it is true, but not made so and so only; we are made with a power in ourselves beside--a power that can lay hold on the original power that made us. We are not made to remain as we are. We are bound to grow." She spoke rapidly, with glowing eyes, the fire of her utterance consuming every shadow of the didactic. "You are too much of a philosopher for me, Miss Raymount," said Vavasor with a smile. "But just answer me one question. What if a man is too weak to change?" "He must change," said Hester. Then first Vavasor began to feel the conversation getting quite too serious. "Ah, well!" he said. "But don't you think this is rather--ah--rather--don't you know?--for an aquarium?" Hester did not reply. Nothing was too serious for her in any place. She was indeed a peculiar girl--the more the pity for the many that made her so! "Let us go and see the octopus," said Vavasor. They went, and Mr. Raymount slowly followed them. He had not heard the last turn of their conversation. "You two have set me thinking," he said, when he joined them; "and brought to my mind an observation I had made--how seldom you find art succeed in representing the hatefully ugly! The painter can accumulate ugliness, but I do not remember a demon worth the name. The picture I can best recall with demons in it is one of Raphael's--a St. Michael slaying the dragon--from the Purgatorio, I think, but I am not sure; not one of the demons in that picture is half so ugly as your dog-fish.--What if it be necessary that we should have lessons in ugliness?" "But why?" said Hester. "Is not the ugly better let alone? You have always taught that ugliness is the natural embodiment of evil!" "Because we have chosen what is bad, and do not know how ugly it is--that is why," answered her father. "Isn't that rather hard on the fish, though?" said Vavasor. "How can innocent creatures be an embodiment of evil?"