Pelleas has a little niece who when she sits in my room in the sun
combing her brown hair looks like a mermaid. I told her this when on
the morning after our return from the seashore she arrived to make us
a visit and came to sit in my sunny window with her hair all about her
shoulders drying from its fragrant bath.
“Lisa,” I said, for the sea was still in my soul, “if I might tie your
hair back with a rainbow and set you on a tall green and white wave you
would be a mermaid. And by the way,” I added, “perhaps you can tell me
something about which I have always wondered: How the mermaids in the
sea pictures keep their hair so dry?”
For answer Lisa smiled absently and spread a soft strand into shining
meshes and regarded it meditatively and sighed dolorously. But Lisa
was twenty, and Twenty is both meditative and dolorous, so I went
on tranquilly laying sachets in my old lace; for at seventy I have
sunk some of my meditation and all my dolour in such little joys as
arranging my one box of rare old lace. That seems a small lesson for
life to have taught, and yet it was hard to learn.
“I rather think she was Latona’s brood,
And that Apollo courted her bright hair--”