She was a dainty thing, modestly clad, crowned with fluffy auburn, and with a face pigmented with the most genuine of cream and peaches. Frieda presented me, and she smiled, graciously, saying a few bright nothings about the heat, after which she rejoined her companion, a rather tall and gawky youth.
"She posed for me as Niobe two years ago," said my friend. "At present, she teaches physical culture."
"What!" I exclaimed, "that wisp of a girl."
"Yes, I don't know how many pounds she can lift; ever so many. She's a perfect darling and looks after an old mother, who still deplores Mackville Four Corners. Her cousin is in safe hands."
I took another look at the six-footer with her, who smoked a cigarette with evident unfamiliarity.
"Would," I said, "that every youth, confronted by the perils of New York for the first time, might be guided in such security. She is showing him the revelry of Camus and has proved to him that a slightly Bohemian atmosphere is not incompatible with personal cleanliness and a soul kept white. It will broaden his horizon. Then she will take him home at a respectable hour, after having demonstrated to him the important fact that pleasure, edible viands and a cheerful atmosphere may be procured here out of a two-dollar bill, leaving a little change for carfare."
"If I were a man," said Frieda, "I should fall in love with her."
"If you were a man, my dear, you would fall in love a dozen times a day."
"Gordon McGrath says it's the only safe way," she retorted.
"Don't be quoting him to me," I advised her. "To him it is a mere egotistic formula. Like yourself, he has always been afraid to descend from generalities. I don't like the trait in him, whereas, in you, I admire it, because, with you, it is the mere following of a tendency to wholesale affection for your fellow-beings. Yet it is a slightly curious and abnormal condition."