“Well, your little Undine is very bewitching, and much more than bewitching, true to the core and loyal and loving. If only the hardness of her life does not embitter her, I think she will make a grand woman.”
“Tell me what you did this afternoon,” said Brian; “you must have been some time with them.”
Charles Osmond told him all that had passed; then continued:
“She is, as I said, a fascinating, bright little Undine, inclined to be willful, I should fancy, and with a sort of warmth and quickness about her whole character, in many ways still a child, and yet in others strangely old for her years; on the whole I should say as fair a specimen of the purely natural being as you would often meet with. The spiritual part of her is, I fancy, asleep.”
“No, I fancy tonight has made it stir for the first time,” said Brian, and he told his father a little of what had passed between himself and Erica.
“And the Longfellow was, I suppose, from you,” said Charles Osmond. “I wish you could have seen her delight over it. Words absolutely failed her. I don't think any one else noticed it, but, her own vocabulary coming to an end, she turned to ours, it was 'What HEAVENLY person can have sent me this?'”
Brian smiled, but sighed too.
“One talks of the spiritual side remaining untouched,” he said, “yet how is it ever to be otherwise than chained and fettered, while such men as that Randolph are recognized as the champions of our cause, while injustice and unkindness meet her at every turn, while it is something rare and extraordinary for a Christian to speak a kind word to her. If today she has first realized that Christians need not necessarily behave as brutes, I have realized a little what life is from her point of view.”
“Then, realizing that perhaps you may help her, perhaps another chapter of the old legend may come true, and you may be the means of waking the spirit in your Undine.”
“I? Oh, no! How can you think of it! You or Donovan, perhaps, but even that idea seems to me wildly improbable.”