ceptions of beauty--roundness and smoothness, I think they are,
according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent charm; as
for smoothness--the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother
she becomes.

Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure
Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam. She
was a fruit-stand blonde--strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc. Her
eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a storm
that never comes. But it seems to me that words (at any rate per) are
wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful. Like fancy, "It is
engendered in the eyes." There are three kinds of beauties--I was
foreordained to be homiletic; I can never stick to a story.

The first is the freckle-faced, snub-nosed girl whom you like. The
second is Maud Adams. The third is, or are, the ladies in Bouguereau's
paintings. Ileen Hinkle was the fourth. She was the mayoress of
Spotless Town. There were a thousand golden apples coming to her as
Helen of the Troy laundries.

The Parisian Restaurant was within a radius. Even from beyond its
circumference men rode in to Paloma to win her smiles. They got them.
One meal--one smile--one dollar. But, with all her impartiality,
Ileen seemed to favor three of her admirers above the rest. According
to the rules of politeness, I will mention myself last.

The first was an artificial product known as Bryan Jacks--a name
that had obviously met with reverses. Jacks was the outcome of paved
cities. He was a small man made of some material resembling flexible
sandstone. His hair was the color of a brick Quaker meeting-house;
his eyes were twin cranberries; his mouth was like the aperture under
a drop-letters-here sign.

He knew every city from Bangor to San Francisco, thence north to
Portland, thence S. 45 E. to a given point in Florida. He had mastered
every art, trade, game, business, profession, and sport in the world,
had been present at, or hurrying on his way to, every headline event
that had ever occurred between oceans since he was five years old. You
might open the atlas, place your finger at random upon the name of
a town, and Jacks would tell you the front names of three prominent
citizens before you could close it again. He spoke patronizingly and
even disrespectfully of Broadway, Beacon Hill, Michigan, Euclid, and
Fifth avenues, and the St. Louis Four Courts. Compared with him as a
cosmopolite, the Wan