“The fashions are so funny, Mr. Percival!” she insisted. “Do look at these preposterous hoop-skirts and the little short waists. Did you say that no one knows how that gold leaf was put on that ugly old book? How absurd! I must put that down. I suppose that is the kind of thing I have to write up.”
“Be sure you don’t get mixed up and describe monkish fichus and gold leaf on the bias, or you’ll be everlastingly disgraced in the office.”
“Never mind. I’ll learn your horrid old pieces of information in a few minutes. Do let me look at this a little longer,” Lena answered so prettily, and pointed with so dainty a finger, and glanced up so pathetically, that Dick too became absorbed in Godey’s Lady’s Book.
“Weren’t they frightful guys?” Lena went on. “But I dare say the men of that time—what is the date?—1862—thought they were lovely.”
“Very likely, poor men! You see they hadn’t the privilege of knowing the girls of to-day and they thought their own women were the top-notch.”
“Now you are horrid and sarcastic,” said Lena.
“Never a bit. I find it impossible to believe that there was ever before so much beauty in the world. There was here and there a pretty girl, like Helen of Troy, and they made an awful fuss over her.”
“But she must have been really wonderful.”
“Yes, if a girl is as much run after as that, she must either be a raving beauty or else she lives in the far West.”
“But, you know, there aren’t so very many real beauties nowadays, are there?” She glanced sidewise at him in an adorable manner.