'Why should we?' she asked lightly.

He watched her. Her child-like indifference to consequences touched him
with a sense of the distance between them. He himself might play with
the delicious warm surface of life, but always he reeked 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 inscrutable, or else mean and vulgar, below
consideration. 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 today.' 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.

'But my feet are wet.' She laughed.

He kneeled down and dried her feet on his handkerchief while she sat
tossing his hair with her finger-tips. The sunlight grew more and
more golden.