he pennies and the pounds
will take care of themselves--the gospel of Benjamin Franklin."

"Ah," I said, looking up at the entrance of a newcomer, "you are just
in time, Margaret, to give the coup de grace, for it is evident by Mr.
Morgan's reference, in his Bunker Hill position, to Franklin, that he is
getting out of powder."

The girl stood a moment, her slight figure framed in the doorway, while
the company rose to greet her, with a half-hesitating, half-inquiring
look in her bright face which I had seen in it a thousand times.

II

I remember that it came upon me with a sort of surprise at the
moment that we had never thought or spoken much of Margaret Debree as
beautiful. We were so accustomed to her; we had known her so long, we
had known her always. We had never analyzed our admiration of her.
She had so many qualities that are better than beauty that we had not
credited her with the more obvious attraction. And perhaps she had just
become visibly beautiful. It may be that there is an instant in a girl's
life corresponding to what the Puritans called conversion in the soul,
when the physical qualities, long maturing, suddenly glow in an
effect which we call beauty. It cannot be that women do not have a
consciousness of it, perhaps of the instant of its advent. I remember
when I was a child that I used to think that a stick of peppermint candy
must burn with a consciousness of its own deliciousness.

Margaret was just turned twenty. As she paused there in the doorway her
physical perfection flashed upon me for the first time. Of course I do
not mean perfection, for perfection has no promise in it, rather the sad
note of limit, and presently recession. In the rounded, exquisite lines
of her figure there was the promise of that ineffable fullness and
delicacy of womanhood which all the world raves about and destroys and
mourns. It is not fulfilled always in the most beautiful, and perhaps
never except to the woman who loves passionately, and believes she is
loved with a devotion that exalts her body and soul above every other
human being.

It is certain that Margaret's beauty was not classic. Her features
were irregular even to piquancy. The chin had strength; the mouth was
sensitive and not too small; the shapely nose with thin nostrils had an
assertive quality that contradicted the impression of humility in the
eyes when downcast; the large gray eyes were uncommonly soft and clear,
an appearance of al