“Sometimes,” smiled Siegmund.
“But I did not think it could be so fine-fingered,” she said. She breathed on the glass bulb till it looked like a dim magnolia bud; she inhaled its fine savour.
“It would not have treated you so well,” he said. She looked at him with heavy eyes. Then she returned to her bulb. Her fingers were very small and very pink. She had the most delicate touch in the world, like a faint feel of silk. As he watched her lifting her fingers from off the glass, then gently stroking it, his blood ran hot. He watched her, waited upon her words and movements attentively.
“It is a graceful act on the sea’s part,” she said. “Wotan is so clumsy—he knocks over the bowl, and flap-flap-flap go the gasping fishes, pizzicato!—but the sea—”
Helena’s speech was often difficult to render into plain terms. She was not lucid.
“But life’s so full of anti-climax,” she concluded. Siegmund smiled softly at her. She had him too much in love to disagree or to examine her words.
“There’s no reckoning with life, and no reckoning with the sea. The only way to get on with both is to be as near a vacuum as possible, and float,” he jested. It hurt her that he was flippant. She proceeded to forget he had spoken.
There were three children on the beach. Helena had handed him back the senseless bauble, not able to throw it away. Being a father:
“I will give it to the children,” he said.
She looked up at him, loved him for the thought.