A sixteen-year-old girl, listening to such words, can hardly be blamed for a slight sense of self-importance. It is part of a girl’s education, or ought to be. Perhaps not at sixteen; but Mermaid had already experienced the self-importance that comes from handling rather risky material, even though it was only inert powder or colourless acid. This was one of those situations where there is no danger if the substances are not brought near to a spark. She therefore dampened her sympathy before mixing it with Tommy’s unreserve. She felt self-importance, but she did not abate her caution. More than one explosion in the laboratory had taught her humility. It is fair to say that she was not consciously experimenting and she was not heartless when she answered the boy. “I don’t want to help you make something of yourself, Tommy. I don’t want to make anything of anybody except _my_self. I’ll have all I can do, maybe, to do that,” she continued. “I--I like you, and that’s all. No, it isn’t; I’ll let you alone. There--that’s a good deal, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be, from a girl.” Poor Tommy was in no condition to jest. He picked himself up, unhappily, from the sand. For a moment Mermaid’s mind ran back curiously to the story that, as a very little girl, she had heard her Uncle Ho tell of his boyhood. Nightly, through the pane of a little attic window high up in the hills of the middle of Long Island, he had seen the flash of the Fire Island Lighthouse, many miles distant, a beacon inviting the youngster to adventures in the great world whose shores it guarded. Mermaid, who was imaginative, had often re-lived those childish hours in the dark attic invaded by the beckoning ray. As she stood up now, gathering up her sweater and one or two books from the beach, it came home to her that Tommy Lupton, who was twenty, would never undergo such an experience. Poor Tommy was not imaginative; for him no beacon flamed anywhere; his whole idea of life was work well-performed, a wife and children (probably), and a comfortable home to visit in his hours off duty. And once, if fortune brought it about, once in a long lifetime of work and play and peacefulness, an heroic moment, one deed worthy of admiration, a single act of bravery or courage or devotion that would show the stuff that was in him--all the rest would be background. If the moment never came that would not matter. The only thing that mattered was to be ready for it if it should come.