Ethel always cuts me off when I make any references to my lost youth. She calls them my calf love days and takes no interest in them, while I contend that some of the happiest moments in a man’s life are when he roams the fields in retrospect with a girl who is always ten times prettier than anyone he ever met. I once met one of those old-time beauties and the shock was terrific. I tried to restore her features as I gazed at her, but my imagination balked at the task. She was a good woman, the mother of seven good children, but the vision of the lovely, dancing-eyed, pink-cheeked, rosebud-mouthed, shell-like-eared, dimple-chinned naiad of my early youth was gone.
From the way in which she looked at me, I felt that she had suffered a like shock. The tall, lithe-limbed, high-browed, innocent-faced, clear-eyed, light-hearted boy of sixteen no longer stood before her. Thanks be to the conventions of society, neither one of us wished that our tongues could utter the thoughts that arose in us, and we both had the audacity to speak of the jolly days of long ago, and I left her, thinking that I still considered her the little beauty of 1886, while she left me still imagining that I thought she thought me the handsome youth of the same year.
Ethel gave a little cry of delight.
“I’ve found one, Philip. It’s just like the picture in the book.”
“Why, of course,” said I. “You don’t suppose that they make up those pictures and expect the plants to conform to them?”
Not noticing my flippancy, she came over with two of the little flowers and held them up for me to see.
“They look like something very pretty, Minerva. What do they remind you of?”
“A pair of pants,” said Minerva, with a loud laugh.
“Dutchmen’s breeches, do you mean?” said Ethel. “Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, they are like little knickerbockers, but they remind me of Japanese lanterns. Now, Minerva, the woods and the fields are full of plants like these and they all have names and each has a beauty of its own—”
“What’s Dutchmen’s breeches?” interrupted Minerva. She had been to the “Continuous” many times and I think that Dutchmen’s breeches brought to her mind a pair of knockabout comedians.