“Couldn’t you write, ’Venus-of-Milo-like’?” he inquired.  “That is laconic.”

“I could—­if it’s true.  But if you mean it for praise—­I—­don’t think any modern woman would be flattered.”

“I always supposed that she of Milo had an ideal figure,” he said, perplexed.

She wrote, “A good figure.”  Then, propping her rounded chin on one lovely white hand, she glanced at the next question: 

“Hands?”

“White, beautiful, rose-tipped, slender yet softly and firmly rounded—­”

“How can they be soft and firm, too, Mr. Gatewood?” she protested; then, surprising his guilty eyes fixed on her hands, hastily dropped them and sat up straight, level-browed, cold as marble. Was he deliberately being rude to her?

CHAPTER IV

As a matter of fact, he was not.  Too poor in imagination to invent, on the spur of the moment, charms and qualities suited to his ideal, he had, at first unconsciously, taken as a model the girl before him; quite unconsciously and innocently at first—­then furtively, and with a dawning perception of the almost flawless beauty he was secretly plagiarizing.  Aware, now, that something had annoyed her; aware, too, at the same moment that there appeared to be nothing lacking in her to satisfy his imagination of the ideal, he began to turn redder than he had ever turned in all his life.

Several minutes of sixty seconds each ensued before he ventured to stir a finger.  And it was only when she bent again very gravely over her pad that he cautiously eased a cramped muscle or two, and drew a breath—­a long, noiseless, deep and timid respiration.  He realized the enormity of what he had been doing—­how close he had come to giving unpardonable offense by drawing a perfect portrait of her as the person he desired to find through the good offices of Keen & Co.

But there was no such person—­unless she had a double:  for what more could a man desire than the ideal traits he had been able to describe only by using her as his inspiration.

When he ventured to look at her, one glance was enough to convince him that she, too, had noticed the parallel—­had been forced to recognize her own features in the portrait he had constructed of an ideal.  And she had caught him in absent-minded contemplation of the hands he had been describing.  He knew that his face was the face of a guilty man.

“What is the next question?” he stammered, eager to answer it in a manner calculated to allay her suspicions.

“The next question?” She glanced at the list, then with a voice of velvet which belied the eyes, clear as frosty brown pools in November:  “The next question requires a description of her feet.”

“Feet!  Oh—–­they—­they’re rather large—­why, her feet are enormous, I believe—­”

She looked at him as though stunned; suddenly a flood of pink spread, wave on wave, from the white nape of her neck to her hair; she bent low over her pad and wrote something, remaining in that attitude until her face cooled.