He looked at her regretfully.  “Perhaps you’d better question me,” said he.  Maybe I can scare up details if you’ll let me know just what you wish to hear about.”

“How are their dresses made?” she asked.

“Oh, skirt, and waist, and so on,” he airily replied.

She made a gesture of impatience.  “Well, then, how is the skirt made?  Tell me that.  Tell me everything that you remember about skirts.  Are they loose as mine, or tighter?” She rose and stood before him, in her scant drapery of homespun, turning slowly, so that he might see.

It was very clever.  Instantly it brought to mind the last girls he had seen down in the lowlands at a lawn-party, with their wide and much beruffled skirts.

“Oh, they’re looser,” he said gravely.  “Much, much looser.  Why, they are as big around as that!” He made a sweeping, circular gesture with his arms.

“What for trimmings do they have?”

“Oh, all sorts of things—­ruffles, frills, embroidery and laces.”

“What’s embroidery?”

He tried to tell her, but he did not make it very clear, and, realizing that he had done quite his best although he had not done so very well, she sighed and dropped that detail of the subject.  But she knew what frills and ruffles were.

“And how about their waists?” said she.  “Like mine, are they?”

He looked, appraisingly, at the loose basque, which, because of the budding beauty of her form rather than because of any merit of its own, had seemed to him most charming and attractive.  Close examination did not show this to be the case.  It was a crude garment, certainly, of crude material, crude cut, crude make.  The beauty all was in the wearer’s soft young curves and lissome grace.

“No,” he answered, honestly, “they’re not like that.  In the summer, and for evenings—­such as dances and the like—­they are cut low at the neck.  And they are tighter.”

“I suppose,” said she, “they wear them things that they call corsets, under ’em.  I’ve heard of ’em—­I saw one, once—­but I ain’t never had one.  Maybe I had better get one.”

He spoke hastily.  At that moment, as he gazed at her slim grace, undulant, untrammelled and as willowy as a spring sapling’s, it seemed to him that it would be a sacrilege to confine it in the stiff rigidity of such artificialities as corsets.  It seemed a bit indelicate, to him, to talk to her about such matters, but her guilelessness was so real and he was so assured of his own innocence, that he did what he could to make things clear to her.  He descanted with some eloquence upon the wickedness of lacing, the ungracefulness of artificial forms and the beauty of her own wholly natural grace.

“I’m glad you think I’m pretty,” she said frankly, plainly greatly pleased, “but I reckon I’d be prettier if I had one of them there corsets.”

His protests to the contrary were not convincing, in the least.