“Are my questions monotonous? Do I bore you with them, George?”
“No, dear. I should be very hard to please if you bored me. It is your charm that makes our life what it is.”
“I wish I believed that. What is charm? What do you mean by it? It is not an intellectual gift, it is not a quality, a talent, nor accomplishment. I believe you tell me that I have it because you do not know what else to say. It is so easy to say to a woman ‘You are full of charm,’ when she is ugly and stupid and cannot play on the piano, and you feel obliged to be civil. I am sure that there is no such thing as charm. It is only an imaginary compliment. Why not tell me the truth?”
“You are neither ugly nor stupid, and I am sincerely glad that you leave the piano alone,” said George. “I could find any number of compliments to make, if that were my way. But it is not, of course. You have lots of good points, Mamie. Look at yourself in the glass if you do not believe it. Look at your figure, look at your eyes, at your complexion, at your hands—listen to your own voice——”
“Do not talk nonsense, George. Besides, that is only a catalogue. If you want to please me you must compare all those things to beautiful objects. You must say that my eyes are like—gooseberries, for instance, my figure like—what shall I say?”
“Like Psyche’s,” suggested George.
“Or like an hour-glass, and my hands like stuffed gloves, and my skin like a corn starch pudding, and my voice like the voice of the charmer. That is the way to be complimentary. Poetry must make use of similes and call a spade an ace—as papa says. When you have done all that, and turned your catalogue into blank verse, tell me if there is anything left which you can call charm.”
“Charm,” George answered, “is what every man who loves a woman thinks she has—and if she has it all men love her. You have it.”
“Dear me!” exclaimed the young girl. “Can you get no nearer to a definition than that?”
“Can you define anything which you only feel and cannot see—heat for instance, or cold?”