, gaping fragments up for the edification of Budapest,
Petrograd, Vienna, London, Berlin, Paris, and Stevens Point, Wis., said
that five minutes of Harrietta Fuller's conversation was worth a
lifetime of New York stage dialogue. For that matter I think that Mr.
Beerbohm himself would not have found a talk with her altogether dull or
profitless.

The leading man generally made love to her in an expert, unaggressive
way. A good many men had tried to make love to her at one time or
another. They didn't get on very well. Harrietta never went to late
suppers. Some of them complained: "When you try to make love to her she
laughs at you!" She wasn't really laughing at them. She was laughing at
what she knew about life. Occasionally men now married, and living dully
content in the prim suburban smugness of Pelham or New Rochelle, boasted
of past friendship with her, wagging their heads doggishly. "Little
Fuller! I used to know her well."

They lied.

Not that she didn't count among her friends many men. She dined with
them and they with her. They were writers and critics, lawyers and
doctors, engineers and painters. Actors almost never. They sent her
books and flowers; valued her opinion, delighted in her conversation,
wished she wouldn't sometimes look at them so quizzically. And if they
didn't always comprehend her wit, they never failed to appreciate the
contour of her face, where the thoughtful brow was contradicted by the
lovely little nose, and both were drowned in the twin wells of the
wide-apart, misleadingly limpid eyes that lay ensnaringly between.

"Your eyes!" these gentlemen sometimes stammered, "the lashes are
reflected in them like ferns edging a pool."

"Yes. The mascara's good for them. You'd think all that black sticky
stuff I have put on, would hurt them, but it really makes them grow, I
believe. Sometimes I even use a burnt match, and yet it----"

"Damn your burnt matches! I'm talking about your lashes."

"So am I." She would open her eyes wide in surprise, and the lashes
could almost be said to wave at him tantalizingly, like fairy fans. (He
probably wished he could have thought of that.)

Ken never talked to her about her lashes. Ken thought she was the most
beauteous, witty, intelligent woman in the world, but he had never told
her so, and she found herself wishing he would. Ken was forty-one and
Knew About Etchings. He knew about a lot of other things, too.
Difficult, complex things like Harriet