“Don’t you think we had better be mounting the cliffs?” he said.
She glanced up at him, smiling with irresponsible eyes. Then she lapped the water with her feet, and surveyed her pink toes. She was absurdly, childishly happy.
“Why should we?” she asked lightly.
He watched her. Her child-like indifference to con- sequences touched him with a sense of the distance between them. He himself might play with the delicious warm surface of life, but always he recked of the relentless mass of cold beneath—the mass of life which has no sympathy with the individual, no cognizance of him.
She loved the trifles and the toys, the mystery and the magic of things. She would not own life to be relentless. It was either beautiful, fantastic, or weird, or unscrutable, or else mean and vulgar, below con- sideration. He had to get a sense of the anemone and a sympathetic knowledge of its experience, into his blood, before he was satisfied. To Helena an anemone was one more fantastic pretty figure in her kaleidoscope.
So she sat dabbling her pink feet in the water, quite unconscious of his gravity. He waited on her, since he never could capture her.
“Come,” he said very gently. “You are only six years old to-day.”
She laughed as she let him take her. Then she nestled up to him, smiling in a brilliant, child-like fashion. He kissed her with all the father in him sadly alive.
“Now put your stockings on,” he said.
