“Not always.  What is sponge cake for me may be sawdust for somebody else.  Say, I rode for an hour in a ’rickshaw at Nagoya to see the most beautiful girl in Japan and when we got to the teahouse they trotted out a little shrimp that looked as if she’d been dried over a barrel—­you know, stood bent all the time, as if she was getting ready to jump.  Her neck was no bigger than a gripman’s wrist and she had a nose that stood right out from her face almost an eighth of an inch.  Her eyes were set on the bias and she was painted more colors than a bandwagon.  I said, ’If this is the champion geisha, take me back to the land of the chorus girl.’  And in China!  Listen!  I caught a Chinese belle coming down the Queen’s Road in Hong-Kong one day, and I ran up an alley.  I have seen Parisian beauties that had a coat of white veneering over them an inch thick, and out here in this country I have seen so-called cracker-jacks that ought to be doing the mountain-of-flesh act in the Ringling side-show.  So there you are!”

“But in your own country, and in the larger cities of the world, there must be some sort of standard.  What are the requirements?  What must a woman be, that all men would call her beautiful?”

“Well, Princess, that’s a pretty hard proposition to dope out.  Good looks can not be analyzed in a lab or worked out by algebra, because, I’m telling you, the one that may look awful lucky to me may strike somebody else as being fairly punk.  Providence framed it up that way so as to give more girls a chance to land somebody.  Still, there is one kind that makes a hit wherever people are bright enough to sit up and take notice.  Now I suppose that any male being in his right senses would find it easy to look at a woman who was young enough and had eyes and hair and teeth and the other items, all doing team-work together, and then if she was trim and slender—­”

“Should she be slender?” interrupted Kalora, leaning toward him.

“Sure.  I don’t mean the same width all the way up and down, like an art student, but trim and—­Here, I’ll show you.  You will find the pictures of the most beautiful women in the world right here in the ads of a ten-cent magazine.  Look them over and you will understand what I mean.”

He turned page after page and showed her the tapering goddesses of the straight front, the tooth-powder, the camera, the breakfast-food, the massage-cream, and the hair-tonic.

“These are what you call beautiful women?” she asked.

“These are about the limit.”

“Then in your country I would not be considered hideous, would I?”

“Hideous?  Say, if you ever walked up Fifth Avenue you would block the traffic!  And in the palm-garden at the Waldorf—­why, you and the head waiter would own the place!  Are you trying to string me by asking such questions?  Are you a real ingenue, or a kidder?”

“I hardly know what you mean, but I assure you that here in Morovenia they laugh at me because I am not fat.”