“That’d be me,” Letty whispered to herself; “my arms clasped round a marble statue—like my prince—but only a marble statue.”
“Her flowers were neglected,” Allerton read on, “and grew wild in a luxuriant tangle of stem and blossom, reaching the branches of the willow-tree, and making the whole place dark and dim. At last she 211 could bear it no longer and she told one of her sisters––”
“I wouldn’t tell my sister, if I had one,” Letty assured herself. “I’d never tell no one. It’s more like my own secret when I keep it to myself. Nobody’ll ever know—not even him.”
“The other sisters learned the story then, but they told it to no one but a few other mermaids, who told it to their intimate friends. One of these friends knew who the prince was, and told the princess where he came from and where his kingdom lay. Now she knew where he lived; and many a night she spent there, floating on the water. She ventured nearer to the land than any of her sisters had done. She swam up the narrow lagoon, under the carved marble balcony; and there she sat and watched the prince when he thought himself alone in the moonlight. She remembered how his head had rested on her breast, and how she had kissed his brow; but he would never know, and could not even dream of her.”
Letty had not kissed her prince’s brow, but she had kissed his feet; but he would never know that, and would dream of her no more than this other prince of the little thing who loved him.
Allerton continued to read on, partly because the old tale came back to him with its enchanting loveliness, partly because reading aloud would be a feature of his educational scheme, and partly because it soothed him to be doing it. He could never read to Barbara. Once, when he tried it, the sound of his voice and the monotony of his cadences, so got on her 212 nerves that she stopped him in the middle of a word. But this girl with her uncritical mind, and her gratitude for small bits of kindliness, gave him confidence in himself by her rapt way of listening.
She did listen raptly, since a prince’s reading must always be more arresting than that of ordinary mortals, and also because, both consciously and subconsciously, she was taking his pronunciation as a standard.
And just at this minute her name was under discussion in a brilliant gathering at The Hindoo Lantern, in another quarter of New York.
If you know The Hindoo Lantern you know how much it depends on atmosphere. Once a disused warehouse in a section of the city which commerce had forsaken, the enthusiasm for the dance which arose about 1910, has made it a temple. It gains, too, by being a temple of the esoteric. The Hindoo Lantern is not everybody’s lantern, and does not swing in the open vulgar street. You might live in New York a hundred years and unless you were one of the initiated and privileged, you might never know of its existence.