The athletic girl easily thus runs to prose. Sometimes her prose is very funny. She looked up lately from a novel with the speech—
“There’s one thing I do want to know most awfully, Daddy—how people ‘gnash’ their teeth. Is it anything like this—or this—or this?”
Each question was accompanied by a facial illustration. Daddy is a serious man, but he laughed heartily.
Sometimes, however, Daddy shakes his head. The following is a case in point.
“Do you know, my dear,” he asked, “the difference between a soprano and a contralto?”
“Why, of course, Dad,” was the answer. “The one’s a squeak and the other’s a squawk.”
Such a girl has some knowledge, but she lacks some grace. Very often the athletic girl lacks both knowledge and grace. Sometimes, too, she lacks brains. The outward marks by which you shall know her in that case are that she has large ears and a little forehead. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are not many.
Of accomplishments the average athletic girl has few. All the French she knows she puts into a smile, and that smile is the one with which she meets any references to customs of the good old time. It says—
Nous avons changé tout cela.