But he turned on us an appalled countenance as though he had just caught the rector kissing the president of the Ladies' Auxiliary. Instinctively we felt he was going to say something about our little friend of the dimples. He did.
"She paints!" he gasped. "Isn't it terrible to see a young girl—and rather comely, too, so far as I could observe in passing—paint the way she does?"
The old snooper! And he looked at us in the confident expectation that we would agree with him. We affected to misunderstand him and said that perhaps she did paint badly, and that Cubism and Futurism and the other new movements were playing the very devil with art. Painting wasn't at all what it used to be, and we proceeded to instance two or three men we know who also paint very badly indeed.
"They seem to have lost their sense of tonality and chiaroscuro," we remarked desperately, hoping the technical balderdash would distract his attention. "The vibration seems to have gone out of their paint, and their brush-work is..."
"But she paints herself!" he insisted.
Isn't that characteristic of the truly religious mind? They never miss a thing, those chaps. They seem to know instinctively—at least, we hope it is instinctively—everything that a woman shakes, smears, or pours on herself. They can tell rouge, face-powder, or hair-dye blocks away. If they tried hard they could probably tell you where every woman on the street buys her complexion, her coiffure, and her contours, and how they are put on. It is a great gift. Personally, it takes us years of acquaintance to find out.
We remember once a very churchly young man—the kind that always shows you to a pew and opens the hymn-book at the right place for you—telling us of a musical comedy into which he would seem to have wandered under a misapprehension. We had gone ourself, and it had struck us as being decidedly tame. But he was filled with indignant wonder that the Censor should permit such shameless and Babylonian displays.
"Fortunately I sat at the back of the house," he said, "or I wouldn't have known where to look. One of the girls in the chorus, the second from the right, didn't even wear tights, but danced in her bare legs!"
Great guns! And there we had sat up in Row E on the aisle—the Dramatic Critic let us have the seats that night—and hadn't seen a darn thing. Verily there is some power that sharpeneth the eye of the virtuous man and revealeth unto him the dishabille of the wicked. For an upright heart is more powerful than opera-glasses, and sanctity more exciting than a seat in the front row.
But to return to the young lady we met on our walk down to the office. Naturally we assured our godly friend that he must be mistaken in his suspicions. A little powder, perhaps, to give that pearly translucency to the complexion and soften the high-lights on the nose, but no paint—nothing like that.