th unusual insight and knowledge on the singing of
Maud Levy, and Faraday was left to conduct the conversation with the
heiress of Barney Ryan.

She was a large, splendid-looking girl, very much corseted, with an
ivory-tinted skin, eyes as clear as a young child's and smooth freshly
red lips. She was a good deal powdered on the bridge of her nose, and
her rich hair was slightly tinted with some reddish dye. She was a
picture of health and material well being. Her perfectly fitting clothes
sat with wrinkleless exactitude over a figure which in its generous
breadth and finely curved outline might have compared with that of the
Venus of Milo. She let her eyes, shadowed slightly by the white lace
edge of her large hat, whereon two pink roses trembled on large stalks,
dwell upon Faraday with a curious and frank interest entirely devoid of
coquetry. Her manner, almost boyish in its simple directness, showed the
same absence of this feminine trait. While she looked like a goddess
dressed by Worth, she seemed merely a good-natured, phlegmatic girl just
emerging from her teens.

Faraday had made the first commonplaces of conversation, when she asked,
eyeing him closely, "Do you like it out here?"

"Oh, immensely," he responded, politely. "It's such a fine climate."

"It is a good climate," admitted Miss. Ryan, with unenthusiastic
acquiescence; "but we are not so proud of that as we are of the good
looks of the Californian women. Don't you think the women are handsome?"

Faraday looked into her clear and earnest eyes.

"Oh splendid," he answered, "especially their eyes."

Miss. Ryan appeared to demur to this commendation. "It's generally said
by strangers that their figures are unusually handsome. Do you think
they are?"

Faraday agreed to this too.

"The girls in the East," said Miss. Ryan, sitting upright with a
creaking sound, and drawing her gloves through one satin-smooth,
bejeweled hand, "are very thin, aren't they? Here, I sometimes
think"--she raised her eyes to his in deep and somewhat anxious
query--"that they are too fat?"

Faraday gallantly scouted the idea. He said the California woman was a
goddess. For the first time in the interview Miss. Ryan gave a little
laugh.

"That's what all you Eastern men say," she said. "They're always telling
me I'm a goddess. Even the Englishmen say that."

"Well," answered Faraday, surprised at his own boldness, "what they say
is true."

Miss. Ryan silently eyed him f