ays when religion was still taken seriously by a great
many people, and in the town of Plymouth where the "Mayflower", having
ploughed its platitudinous way from Holland, had landed its precious
cargo of pious Right Thinkers, moral Gentlemen of God, and--Priscilla.

Priscilla was--well, Priscilla had yellow hair. In a later generation,
in a 1921 June, if she had toddled by at a country club dance you would
have noticed first of all that glorious mass of bobbed corn-colored
locks. You would, then, perhaps, have glanced idly at her face, and
suddenly said "Oh my gosh!" The next moment you would have clutched the
nearest stag and hissed, "Quick--yellow hair--silver dress--oh Judas!"
You would then have been introduced, and after dancing nine feet
you would have been cut in on by another panting stag. In those nine
delirious feet you would have become completely dazed by one of the
smoothest lines since the building of the Southern Pacific. You would
then have borrowed somebody's flask, gone into the locker room and
gotten an edge--not a bachelor-dinner edge but just enough to give
you the proper amount of confidence. You would have returned to the
ballroom, cut in on this twentieth century Priscilla, and taken her and
your edge out to a convenient limousine, or the first tee.

It was of some such yellow-haired Priscilla that Homer dreamed when he
smote his lyre and chanted, "I sing of arms and the man"; it was at the
sight of such as she that rare Ben Johnson's Dr. Faustus cried, "Was
this the face that launched a thousand ships?" In all ages has such
beauty enchanted the minds of men, calling forth in one century the
Fiesolian terza rima of "Paradise Lost", in another the passionate arias
of a dozen Beethoven symphonies. In 1620 the pagan daughter of Helen of
Troy and Cleopatra of the Nile happened, by a characteristic jest of the
great Ironist, to embark with her aunt on the "Mayflower".

Like all girls of eighteen Priscilla had learned to kiss and be kissed
on every possible occasion; in the exotic and not at all uncommon
pleasure of "petting" she had acquired infinite wisdom and complete
disillusionment. But in all her "petting parties" on the "Mayflower" and
in Plymouth she had found no Puritan who held her interest beyond the
first kiss, and she had lately reverted in sheer boredom to her boarding
school habit of drinking gin in large quantities, a habit which was not
entirely approved of by her old-fashioned aunt,