The children said all right, and she wasn’t to mind, and it didn’t matter, and all the things you say when people say they are sorry, and you cannot kiss them and say, “Right oh,” which is the natural answer to such confessions.
“It was very curious,” she said thoughtfully, “a most odd experience, that little boy ... his having been born of people who had always been rich, really seemed to me to be important. I assure you it did. Funny, wasn’t it? And now I want you all to come home with me, and see where I live.”
She smiled radiantly at them, and they all said, “Thank you,” and looked at each other rather blankly.
“All our people will be unspeakably pleased to see you. We Mer-people are not really ungrateful. You mustn’t think that,” she said pleadingly.
She looked very kind, very friendly. But Francis thought of the Lorelei. Just so kind and friendly must the Lady of the Rhine have looked to the “sailor in a little skiff” whom he had disentangled from Heine’s poem, last term, with the aid of the German dicker. By a curious coincidence and the same hard means, Mavis had, only last term, read of Undine, and she tried not to think that there was any lack of soul in the Mermaid’s kind eyes. Kathleen who, by another coincidence, had fed her fancy in English literature on the “Forsaken Merman” was more at ease.
“Do you mean down with you under the sea?” she asked—
“‘Where the sea snakes coil and twine,
Dry their mail and bask in the brine,
Where great whales go sailing by,
Sail and sail with unshut eye