"Black art, you mean," exclaimed the bachelor disgustedly. "A made-up woman is like paste jewelry and imitation bric-a-brac. She looks cheap and unsubstantial and as though she wouldn't wear well. Even granting that you aren't half good enough for us——"
"What!"
"And that you don't come up to our standards——"
The widow dropped her embroidery hoop and sat up with blazing eyes.
"You flatter yourself, Mr. Travers!"
"No, I don't!" retorted the bachelor. "It's you who flatter us, when you think it necessary to plaster over your defects and put additions on your figures and rouge on your cheeks and frills on your manners. As a matter of fact," he added decisively, "a man's ideal is a natural woman with a natural complexion and natural hair and natural ways and natural self-respect."
The widow sighed and took up her embroidery hoop again.
"I used to think so, too," she said sadly.
The bachelor lifted his eyebrows inquiringly.
"Before I discovered," she explained, "that it was just as often a woman with butter-colored hair and a tailor-made figure and a 'past' and a manufactured 'bloom of health.' The truth is," she concluded, stabbing her needle very carefully into the centre of an unhealthy looking green silk rose, "that no two men admire the same woman, and no one man admires the same thing in two women. Now, there's Miss Gunning, who wears a sweater and says 'damn' and is perfectly natural and self-respecting and——"