"Well, what are you doing here?" the younger of the two sages asked, with a resolute air of bonhomie, as he dragged himself over the asphalt path, and sank, gasping, into the seat beside the other in the Park. His senior lifted his head and looked him carefully over to make sure of his identity, and then he said:
"I suppose, to answer your fatuous question, I am waiting here to get my breath before I move on; and in the next place, I am watching the feet of the women who go by in their high-heeled shoes."
"How long do you think it will take you to get your breath in the atmosphere of these motors?" the younger sage pursued. "And you don't imagine that these women are of the first fashion, do you?"
"No, but I imagine their shoes are. I have been calculating that their average heel is from an inch and a half to two inches high, and touches the ground in the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece. As you seem to be fond of asking questions, perhaps you will like to answer one. Why do you think they do it?"
"Wear shoes like that?" the younger returned, cheerily, and laughed as he added, "Because the rest do."
"Mmm!" the elder grumbled, not wholly pleased, and yet not refusing the answer. He had been having a little touch of grippe, and was somewhat broken from his wonted cynicism. He said: "It's very strange, very sad. Just now there was such a pretty young girl, so sweet and fine, went tottering by as helpless, in any exigency, as the daughter of a thousand years of bound-feet Chinese women. While she tilted on, the nice young fellow with her swept forward with one stride to her three on the wide soles and low heels of nature-last boots, and kept himself from out-walking her by a devotion that made him grit his teeth. Probably she was wiser and better and brighter than he, but she didn't look it; and I, who voted to give her the vote the other day, had my misgivings. I think I shall satisfy myself for the next five years by catching cold in taking my hat off to her in elevators, and getting killed by automobiles in helping her off the cars, where I've given her my seat."
"But you must allow that if her shoes are too tight, her skirts are not so tight as they were. Or have you begun sighing for the good old hobble-skirts, now they're gone?"
"The hobble-skirts were prettier than I thought they were when they were with us, but the 'tempestuous petticoat' has its charm, which I find I'd been missing."
"Well, at least it's a change," the younger sage allowed, "and I haven't found the other changes in our dear old New York which I look for when I come back in the fall."
The sages were enjoying together the soft weather which lingered with us a whole month from the middle of October onward, and the afternoon of their meeting in the Park was now softly reddening to the dim sunset over the westward trees.