Ileen Hinkle!

The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it.  No doubt she had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography that Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have endorsed the phonography.

Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through Galveston and Del Rio.  She sat on a high stool in a rough pine grand-stand—­or was it a temple?—­under the shelter at the door of the kitchen.  There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her, with a little arch under which you passed your money.  Heaven knows why the barbed wire; for every man who dined Parisianly there would have died in her service.  Her duties were light; each meal was a dollar; you put it under the arch, and she took it.

I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you.  Instead, I must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled:  A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.  It is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive conceptions of beauty—­roundness and smoothness, I think they are, according to Burke.  It is well said.  Rotundity is a patent charm; as for smoothness—­the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother she becomes.

Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam.  She was a fruit-stand blonde—­strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc.  Her eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a storm that never comes.  But it seems to me that words (at any rate per) are wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful.  Like fancy, “It is engendered in the eyes.”  There are three kinds of beauties—­I was foreordained to be homiletic; I can never stick to a story.

The first is the freckle-faced, snub-nosed girl whom you like.  The second is Maud Adams.  The third is, or are, the ladies in Bouguereau’s paintings.  Ileen Hinkle was the fourth.  She was the mayoress of Spotless Town.  There were a thousand golden apples coming to her as Helen of the Troy laundries.

The Parisian Restaurant was within a radius.  Even from beyond its circumference men rode in to Paloma to win her smiles.  They got them.  One meal—­one smile—­one dollar.  But, with all her impartiality, Ileen seemed to favor three of her admirers above the rest.  According to the rules of politeness, I will mention myself last.

The first was an artificial product known as Bryan Jacks—­a name that had obviously met with reverses.  Jacks was the outcome of paved cities.  He was a small man made of some material resembling flexible sandstone.  His hair was the color of a brick Quaker meeting-house; his eyes were twin cranberries; his mouth was like the aperture under a drop-letters-here sign.