Taking
hands and going to the window we sat looking across the sailless bay.
"How is it that no ships come here? Is the bay looked upon as a mere
ornament and reserved exclusively for the appreciation of visitors?
Those hills, too, look as if they had been designed in a like
intent.... How much more beautiful the bay is without a sail--why I
cannot tell, but----"
"But what?"
"A great galley rowed by fifty men would look well in this bay.... The
bay is antiquity, and those hills; all the morning while talking to
you a memory or a shadow of a memory has fretted in my mind like a fly
on a pane. Now I know why I have been expecting a nymph to rise out of
those waves during breakfast. For a thousand years men believed that
nymphs came up on those rocks, and that satyrs and their progeny might
be met in the woods and on the hillsides. Only a thin varnish has been
passed over these beliefs. One has only to come here to look down into
that blue sea-water to believe that nymphs swim about those rocks; and
when we go for a drive among those hillsides we'll keep a sharp
lookout for satyrs. Now I know why I like this country. It is heathen.
Those mountains--how different from the shambling Irish hills from
whence I have come! And you, Doris, you might have been dug up
yesterday, though you are but two-and-twenty.
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