Little Eve Edgarton | Page 3

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 River! She was at Pekin in the Boxer Rebellion! She's roped steers in Oklahoma! She's matched her embroidery silks to all the sunrise tints on the Himalayas! Just why in creation should she seem meek--do you suppose--to a--to a--twenty-five-dollar-a-week clerk like yourself?"
"'A twenty-five-dollar-a-week clerk like myself?'" the Younger Man fairly gasped. "Why--why--I'm the junior partner of the firm of Barton & Barton, stock-brokers! Why, we're the biggest--"
"Is that so?" quizzed the Older Man with feigned surprise. "Well--well--well! I beg your pardon. But now doesn't it all go to prove just exactly what I said in the beginning--that it doesn't behoove a single one of us to judge too hastily by appearances?"
As if fairly overwhelmed with embarrassment he sat staring silently off into space for several seconds. Then--"Speaking of this Miss Edgarton," he resumed genially, "have you ever exactly sought her out--as it were--and actually tried to get acquainted with her?"
"No," said Barton shortly. "Why, the girl must be thirty years old!"
"S--o?" mused the Older Man. "Just about your age?"
"I'm thirty-two," growled the Younger Man.
"I'm sixty-two, thank God!" acknowledged the Older Man. "And your gorgeous Miss Von Eaton--who bores you so--all of a sudden--is about--?"
"Twenty," prompted the Younger Man.
"Poor--senile--babe," ruminated the Older Man soberly.
"Eh?" gasped the Younger Man, edging forward in his chair. "Eh? 'Senile'? Twenty?"
"Sure!" grinned the Older Man. "Twenty is nothing but the 'sere and yellow leaf' of infantile caprice! But thirty is the jocund youth of character! On land or sea the Lord Almighty never made anything as radiantly, divinely young as--thirty! Oh, but thirty's the darling age in a woman!" he added with sudden exultant positiveness. "Thirty's the birth of individuality! Thirty's the--"
"Twenty has got quite enough individuality for me, thank you!" asserted Barton with some curtness.
"But it hasn't!" cried the Older Man hotly. "You've just confessed that it hasn't!" In an amazing impulse of protest he reached out and shook his freckled fist right under the Younger Man's nose. "Twenty, I tell you, hasn't got any individuality at all!" he persisted vehemently.
"Twenty isn't anything at all except the threadbare cloak of her father's idiosyncrasies, lined with her mother's made-over tact, trimmed with her great-aunt somebody's short-lipped smile, shrouding a brand-new frame of--God knows what!"
"Eh? What?" questioned the Younger Man uneasily.
"When a girl is twenty, I tell you," persisted the Older Man--"there's not one marrying man among us--Heaven help us!--who can swear whether her charm is Love's own permanent food or just Nature's temporary bait! At twenty, I tell you, there's not one man among us who can prove whether vivacity is temperament or just plain kiddishness; whether sweetness is real disposition or just coquetry; whether tenderness is personal discrimination or just sex; whether dumbness is stupidity or just brain hoarding its immature treasure; whether indeed coldness is prudery or just conscious passion banking its fires! The dear daredevil sweetheart whom you worship at eighteen will evolve, likelier than not, into a mighty sour