e not so silkily seductive. It
was Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of the
Princess Novelette, who had first advised her to try eyebrowleine which
gave that haunting expression to the eyes, so becoming in leaders
of fashion, and she had never regretted it. Then there was blushing
scientifically cured and how to be tall increase your height and you
have a beautiful face but your nose? That would suit Mrs Dignam because
she had a button one. But Gerty's crowning glory was her wealth of
wonderful hair. It was dark brown with a natural wave in it. She had cut
it that very morning on account of the new moon and it nestled about
her pretty head in a profusion of luxuriant clusters and pared her nails
too, Thursday for wealth. And just now at Edy's words as a telltale
flush, delicate as the faintest rosebloom, crept into her cheeks she
looked so lovely in her sweet girlish shyness that of a surety God's
fair land of Ireland did not hold her equal.

For an instant she was silent with rather sad downcast eyes. She
was about to retort but something checked the words on her tongue.
Inclination prompted her to speak out: dignity told her to be silent.
The pretty lips pouted awhile but then she glanced up and broke out into
a joyous little laugh which had in it all the freshness of a young May
morning. She knew right well, no-one better, what made squinty Edy
say that because of him cooling in his attentions when it was simply a
lovers' quarrel. As per usual somebody's nose was out of joint about the
boy that had the bicycle off the London bridge road always riding up
and down in front of her window. Only now his father kept him in in the
evenings studying hard to get an exhibition in the intermediate that was
on and he was going to go to Trinity college to study for a doctor when
he left the high school like his brother W. E. Wylie who was racing
in the bicycle races in Trinity college university. Little recked he
perhaps for what she felt, that dull aching void in her heart sometimes,
piercing to the core. Yet he was young and perchance he might learn
to love her in time. They were protestants in his family and of course
Gerty knew Who came first and after Him the Blessed Virgin and then
Saint Joseph. But he was undeniably handsome with an exquisite nose and
he was what he looked, every inch a gentleman, the shape of his head too
at the back without his cap on that she would know anywhere something
off th