“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—”
I was murmuring, when Lisa said:—
“Aunt Etarre, were you ever in love?”
Is it not notable what fragrance floats in the room when that question is asked? Of course it may have been the orris in my hands, but I think that it was more than this.
“If forty-nine and three quarters years of being in love,” I reminded her, “would seem to you fair proof that I—”
“O, that kind,” Lisa said vaguely. “But I mean,” she presently went on, “were you ever in love so that you were miserable about everything else, and you thought all the time that somebody couldn’t possibly love you; and so that seeing the postman made your heart beat the way it used to at school exhibition, and so that you kept the paper that came around flowers....”
Lisa saw me smiling—not at her, Heaven forbid—but at the great collection of rubbish in the world saved because somebody beloved has touched it, or has seen it, or has been with one when one was wearing it.