It wears the moods of the sea,
too: once in a while a warm amethystine mist suffuses it like a blush;
sometimes a white morning fog breathes over it: you long to get into the
heart of it. That's the charm of gems, after all! You feel that they are
fashioned through dissimilar processes from yourself,--that there's a
mystery about them, mastering which would be like mastering a new life,
like having the freedom of other stars. I give them more personality
than I would a great white spirit. I like amber that way, because I know
how it was made, drinking the primeval weather, resinously beading each
grain of its rare wood, and dripping with a plash to filter through and
around the fallen cones below. In some former state I must have been a
fly embalmed in amber.
"Oh, Lu!" I said, "this amber's just the thing for me, such a great
noon creature! And as for you, you shall wear mamma's Mechlin and that
aqua-marina; and you'll look like a mer-queen just issuing from the
wine-dark deeps and glittering with shining water-spheres."
I never let Lu wear the point at all; she'd be ridiculous in it,--so
flimsy and open and unreserved; that's for me;--Mechlin, with its
whiter, closer, chaste web, suits her to a T.
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