“You mean you don’t like to see Miss Peele smoke,” said Patience, mischievously.
He flushed, then laughed. “Well, perhaps that is it. They are all charming, these girls, but there is something about Miss Peele that distinguishes her. Did you ever notice it?”
“Oh, yes. She is herself, and these others are twelve for a dozen.”
“That is it.” He glanced about at the girls in their bright gowns, which clung to their tiny waists and hips, their narrow chests and modest busts, with the wrinkleless perfection that has made the modern milliner the god he is. Their polished skin and brilliant shallow eyes, their elegant sexless forms, their haughty poise and supercilious air, laid aside among themselves but always in reserve, their consciousness of caste, were the several parts of a unique and homogeneous effect, which, Patience confided to Mr. Wynne, must mark out the New York girl in whatever wilds she trod.
“Oh, it does,” he said. “The New York girl is sui generis, and so thoroughly artificial a product that it seems incredible she can exist through another generation. I will venture to predict that the species will be extinct in three, and that American women of a larger and more human type will gradually be drawn into New York, and found a new race, so to speak. Why, it seems to me that the children of these women must be pigmies—imagine one of those girls being the mother of a man. It is well that New York is not America.”
Involuntarily Patience’s eyes wandered to Hal. Her waist was as small, her figure as unwomanly as the others.
“It is true,” said Wynne, answering her thought; “but she is so charming that one is quite willing she should do nothing further for the human race.”
Patience burst into a light laugh.
“What’s the matter?” asked Wynne.
“It suddenly struck me—the almost comical difference between these girls and the ‘Y’s,’ and the ‘King’s Daughters.’ It does not seem possible that such types can exist within ten miles of each other. I should explain that I have passed the last three years in a country town.”