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 an