Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/267

 head, like a mermaid's. I am not ordinarily fanciful or figurative. I dislike fanciful people. But I have somehow got to convey the idea that, as I watched those goldfish, the wires in my mind became crossed and tangled and, for a moment, made some sort of horrid imaginative connection between goldfish and mermaids and the enchantingly girlish figure and golden head of the woman whose gray eyes I felt but could not see, playing over my prostrate body and working some charm at the back of my neck. Cornelia had everything—yes, everything: the virtues and the graces, and a beauty and blitheness which often seemed enough in themselves, they made one so immediately, unmistakably glad to be alive within their radius. But wouldn't she have profited—as Arnold once remarked of the ladies of the English aristocracy, whom Cornelia admires so much—wouldn't she have profited by "a shade more of soul"? Was there much—inside, under those golden scales? Wasn't she pretty near the surface? And was that her fault or her misadventure?

"Do you find them interesting?" asked Cornelia.

"Yes," I replied, continuing my study.

In spite of her nearly grown children, there was something virginal in Cornelia. Something