"It is a mutual mash," declared Dee, when we went to our room to don dinner clothes. "The Greens seem to like us, and don't we just adore the Greens, though!"
"I believe I like him as much as I do her," said Dum. "Of course, he is not so paintable. She makes me uncertain whether I want to be a sculptor or a painter. I have been thinking how she would look in marble, and while she has good bones, all right, and would show up fine in marble, she would certainly lose out if she had to be pure white and could not have that lovely flush and those blue, blue eyes and that red-gold hair."
"I don't see why you talk about Mrs. Green's bones!" exclaimed Dee, rather indignantly. "I can't see that her bones are the least bit prominent."
"Well, goose, I mean her proportions. Beauty, to my mind, does not amount to a row of pins if it is only skin deep; it's got to go clean through to the bones."
"Well, I don't believe it. I bet you Mrs. Green's skeleton would look just like yours or mine or Miss Plympton's or anybody else's."
"You flatter yourself."
"Well, girls," I cried, feeling that pacific intervention was in order, "there's no way to prove or disprove except by X-ray photography so long as we have Mrs. Green on this mundane sphere. I certainly would not have a row over it. Mrs. Green's bones are very pleasingly covered, to my way of thinking."
"They are beautiful bones, or their being well covered would not make any difference. Just see here"—and Dum began rapidly sketching a skull and then piling up hair on it and putting in a nose and lips, etc.—"can't you see if the skull is out of proportion with a jimber jaw and a bulging forehead that all the pretty skin on earth with hair like gold in the sunset would not make it beautiful?"
"Well, I know one thing," put in Dee: "I know you could take a hunk of clay and start to make a mouse and then change your mind and keep on piling clay on, and shaping it, and patting it, and moulding it until you had turned it into a cat. If you can do that much, I should like to know why the Almighty couldn't do the same thing. Couldn't He start with chunky bones, and then fill them out and mould the flesh, pinching in here and plumping out there until He had made a tall and slender person?"
"Dee, you make me tired—you argue like a Sunday School superintendent who is thinking about turning into a preacher. The idea of the Almighty's changing His mind to start out with! Don't you know that from the very beginning of everything the Almighty has planned our proportions, such as they are, and He would no more put a little on here and pull a little off there than He would start to make a mouse and turn it into a cat?"