“Really, Mr. Gatewood, I think you are hopelessly vague on that point—­unless you desire to convey the impression that she is speckled.”

“Speckled!” he repeated, horrified.  “Why, I am describing a woman who is my ideal of beauty—­”

But she had already gone to the next question: 

“Teeth?”

“P-p-perfect p-p-pearls!” he stammered.  The laughing red mouth closed like a flower at dusk, veiling the sparkle of her teeth.

Was he trying to be impertinent?  Was he deliberately describing her?  He did not look like that sort of man; yet why was he watching her so closely, so curiously at every question?  Why did he look at her teeth when she laughed?

“Eyes?” Her own dared him to continue what, coincidence or not, was plainly a description of herself.

“B-b-b—­” He grew suddenly timorous, hesitating, pretending to a perplexity which was really a healthy scare.  For she was frowning.

“Curious I can’t think of the color of her eyes,” he said; “is—­isn’t it?”

She coldly inspected her pad and made a correction; but all she did was to rub out a comma and put another in its place.  Meanwhile, Gatewood, chin in his hand, sat buried in profound thought. “Were they blue?” he murmured to himself aloud, “or were they brown?  Blue begins with a b and brown begins with a b.  I’m convinced that her eyes began with a b.  They were not, therefore, gray or green, because,” he added in a burst of confidence, “it is utterly impossible to spell gray or green with a b!”

Miss Southerland looked slightly astonished.

“All you can recollect, then, is that the color of her eyes began with the letter b?”

“That is absolutely all I can remember; but I think they were—­brown.”

“If they were brown they must be brown now,” she observed, looking out of the window.

“That’s true!  Isn’t it curious I never thought of that?  What are you writing?”

“Brown,” she said, so briefly that it sounded something like a snub.

“Mouth?” inquired the girl, turning a new leaf on her pad.

“Perfect.  Write it:  there is no other term fit to describe its color, shape, its sensitive beauty, its—­What did you write just then?”

“I wrote, ‘Mouth, ordinary.’”

“I don’t want you to!  I want—­”

“Really, Mr. Gatewood, a rhapsody on a girl’s mouth is proper in poetry, but scarcely germane to the record of a purely business transaction.  Please answer the next question tersely, if you don’t mind:  ‘Figure?’”

“Oh, I do mind!  I can’t!  Any poem is much too brief to describe her figure—­”

“Shall we say ’Perfect’?” asked the girl, raising her brown eyes in a glimmering transition from vexation to amusement.  For, after all, it could be only a coincidence that this young man should be describing features peculiar to herself.