en thousand seas!
Little Miss Gunpowder, milder than the dusk before the moon ignites
it! Little Miss Sleeping-Beauty, waiting for her Prince!"

"Oh, yes--I suppose so," conceded the Younger Man impatiently. "But
that Miss Von Eaton--"

"Oh, it isn't that I don't know a pretty face--or hat, when I see it,"
interrupted the Older Man nonchalantly. "It's only that I don't put my
trust in 'em." With a quick gesture, half audacious, half apologetic,
he reached forward suddenly and tapped the Younger Man's coat sleeve.
"Oh, I knew just as well as you," he affirmed, "oh, I knew just as
well as you--at my first glance--that your gorgeous young Miss Von
Eaton was excellingly handsome. But I also knew--not later certainly
than my second glance--that she was presumably rather stupid. You
can't be interesting, you know, my young friend, unless you do
interesting things--and handsome creatures are proverbially lazy.
Humph! If Beauty is excuse enough for Being, it sure takes Plainness
then to feel the real necessity for--Doing.

"So, speaking of hats, if it's stimulating conversation that you're
after, if you're looking for something unique, something significant,
something really worth while--what you want to do, my young friend, is
to find a girl with a hat you'd be ashamed to go out with--and stay
home with her! That's where you'll find the brains, the originality,
the vivacity, the sagacity, the real ideas!"

With his first sign of genuine amusement the Younger Man tipped back
his head and laughed right up into the green-lined roof of the piazza.
"Now just whom would you specially recommend for me?" he demanded
mirthfully. "Among all the feminine galaxy of bores and frumps that
seem to be congregated at this particular hotel--just whom would you
specially recommend for me? The stoop-shouldered, school-marmy Botany
dame with her incessant garden gloves? Or?--Or--?" His whole face
brightened suddenly with a rather extraordinary amount of humorous
malice: "Or how about that duddy-looking little Edgarton girl that I
saw you talking with this morning?" he asked delightedly. "Heaven
knows she's colorless enough to suit even you--with her
winter-before-spring-before-summer-before-last clothes and her voice
so meek you'd have to hold her in your lap to hear it. And her--"

"That 'duddy-looking' little Miss Edgarton--meek?" mused the Older Man
in sincere astonishment. "Meek? Why, man alive, she was born in a
snow-shack on the Yukon