ed to question this young man. Mrs. Plumston had said
to her: "You are beautiful." No one else had ever intimated such a
thing. In fact, for five years she had been taunted almost daily because
of her lack of all physical charms. Perhaps she could learn the truth
about herself by some adroit questioning of the young man from
Pennsylvania.

"You have traveled a great deal?" she asked.

"Me and Baedeker and Cook wrote it," he replied; and then, seeing that
she was puzzled, he said: "I have been to all of the places they keep
open."

"You have seen many women in many countries?"

"I have. I couldn't help it, and I'm glad of it."

"Then you know what constitutes beauty?"

"Not always. What is sponge cake for me may be sawdust for somebody
else. Say, I rode for an hour in a 'rickshaw at Nagoya to see the most
beautiful girl in Japan and when we got to the teahouse they trotted out
a little shrimp that looked as if she'd been dried over a barrel--you
know, stood _bent_ all the time, as if she was getting ready to jump.
Her neck was no bigger than a gripman's wrist and she had a nose that
stood right out from her face almost an eighth of an inch. Her eyes were
set on the bias and she was painted more colors than a bandwagon. I
said, 'If this is the champion geisha, take me back to the land of the
chorus girl.' And in China! Listen! I caught a Chinese belle coming down
the Queen's Road in Hong-Kong one day, and I ran up an alley. I have
seen Parisian beauties that had a coat of white veneering over them an
inch thick, and out here in this country I have seen so-called
cracker-jacks that ought to be doing the mountain-of-flesh act in the
Ringling side-show. So there you are!"

"But in your own country, and in the larger cities of the world, there
must be some sort of standard. What are the requirements? What must a
woman be, that all men would call her beautiful?"

"Well, Princess, that's a pretty hard proposition to dope out. Good
looks can not be analyzed in a lab or worked out by algebra, because,
I'm telling you, the one that may look awful lucky to me may strike
somebody else as being fairly punk. Providence framed it up that way so
as to give more girls a chance to land somebody. Still, there is one
kind that makes a hit wherever people are bright enough to sit up and
take notice. Now I suppose that any male being in his right senses would
find it easy to look at a woman who was young enough and had eyes and
hair