At sixteen Mermaid was not adequately to be described by Longfellow’s lines about the maiden
Standing with reluctant feet
Where the brook and river meet.

She was, without doubt, a girl still, despite her height of five feet two inches, despite the coiled beauty of her coppery hair and the wise young glance of her blue eyes. The three freckles about her nose, the dimples when she smiled, the faint colour in her cheeks, and the slender straightness of her body were wholly girlish; so was her general attitude toward older people. It was only when she was with certain boys slightly her seniors that a sort of womanliness seemed her predominant quality. The nature of this grown-up atmosphere varied. With Guy Vanton, who was twenty-two, Mermaid would[147] have appeared to most onlookers to be rather sisterly. With Tommy Lupton, who was twenty, she was simply an attractive young person of the other sex. But in her attitude toward seventeen-to-eighteen-year-old Richard Hand the girl alternated the r?le of comrade and equal with that of motherly management. These variations were not a matter of ages but of personalities. They were determined by the fact that Guy Vanton, from a lonely boyhood, was developing into a lonely young man; that Tommy Lupton was perfectly normal and a healthy youth who was Mermaid’s senior by an interval which, between a boy and a girl or a man and a woman, is without significance; by the further fact that Dickie Hand needed special treatment and looking after.

For Dickie was a gifted boy who was always on a seesaw. He had his ups and downs of which his grasping old father was but seldom aware, and could have viewed with nothing but contempt. Nor was Dickie likely to get much good of his mother’s philosophy. All her life Mrs. Hand had supposed that everything was for the best; and this opiate of age is no drug to feed to youth. Dickie, whose spirits were either aloft in the air or bumping the ground, could not play seesaw alone. Mermaid recognized as much and seated herself on the other end of the plank. Occasionally Dickie would forget the equilibrium necessary and would make more or less horizontal advances toward her. To restore the[148] balance Mermaid had to meet him halfway, but she seized the first opportunity to remind him that his place was at a distance.

At sixteen Mermaid was halfway through High School at Patchogue. The question of her future remained undecided. Cap’n Smiley, her Dad, and his sister, Keturah, quarrelled mildly about it. The keeper of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station did not like the notion of losing sight of his adopted daughter except for holidays. Keturah thought the girl ought to go away to school.

“Don’t be a fool, John,” she counselled the keeper. “The child will be home two months or more in summer. You won’t be on duty on the beach then, and we can all four—you and she and Hosea and myself—be together. She’s got to have something in her life besides Blue Port, and she’s............