Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 5.pdf/372

Rh for sympathy. "One wants to see it, one wants to be it. One needs to be born a mer-child."

"A mer-child?" asked the Sea Lady.

"Yes— Don't you call your little ones?"

"What little ones?" asked the Sea Lady.

She regarded them for a moment with a frank wonder, the undying wonder of the Immortals at that perpetual decay and death and replacement which is the gist of human life. Then at the expression of their faces she seemed to recollect. "Of course," she said, and then with a transition that made pursuit difficult, she agreed with Adeline. "It is different," she said. "It is wonderful. One feels so alike, you know, and so different. That's just where it is so wonderful. Do I look—? And yet you know I have never had my hair up, nor worn a dressing gown before to-day."

"What do you wear?" asked Miss Glendower. "Very charming things, I suppose."

"It's a different costume altogether," said the Sea Lady, brushing away a crumb.

Just for a moment Mrs. Bunting regarded her visitor fixedly. She had, I fancy, in that moment, an indistinct, imperfect glimpse of pagan possibilities. But there, you know, was the Sea Lady in her wrapper, so palpably a lady, with her pretty hair brought up to date and such a frank innocence in her eyes, that Mrs. Bunting's suspicions vanished as they came.

(But I am not so sure of Adeline.)