tangled on their cheeks? Is it the same thing that opens your lips and
peeps through the doorway and runs away again?"

"MUST my lashes shut because others' do?" said Joyce. "May not lashes
have whims of their own?"

"Nothing is more whimsical," said Martin Pippin. "I have known, for
instance, lashes that WILL be golden though the hair of the head be
dark. It is a silly trick."

"I don't dislike such lashes," said Joyce. "That is, I think I should
not if ever I saw them."

Martin: Perhaps you are right. I should love them in a woman.

Joyce: I never saw them in a woman.

Martin: In a man they would be regrettable.

Joyce: Then why did you give them to Young Gerard?

Martin: Did I? It was pure carelessness. Let us change the color of his
lashes.

Joyce: No, no! I will not have them changed. I would not for the world.

Martin: Dear Mistress Joyce, if I had the world to offer you, I would
sit by the road and break it with a pickax rather than change a single
eyelash in Young Gerard's lids. Since you love them.

Joyce: Oh, did I say so?

Martin: Didn't you?--Mistress Joyce, when you laugh I am ready to
forgive you all your debts.

Joyce: Why, what do I owe you?

Martin: An eyelash.

Joyce: I am sure I do not.

Martin: No? Then a hair of some sort. How will you be able to sleep
to-night with a hair on your conscience? For your own sake, lift that
crowbar.

Joyce: To tell you the truth, I fear to redeem my promise lest you are
unable to redeem yours.

Martin: Which was?

Joyce: To blow it to its fellow, who is now wandering in the night like
thistledown.

Martin: I will do it, nevertheless.

Joyce: It is easier promised than proved. But here is the hair.

Martin: Are you certain it is the same hair?

Joyce: I kept it wound round my finger.

Martin: I know no better way of keeping a hair. So here it goes!

And he held the hair to his lips and blew on it.

Martin: A blessing on it. It will soon be wedded.

Joyce: I have your word on it.

Martin: You shall have your eyes on it if you will tell me one thing.

Joyce: Is it a little thing?

Martin: It's as trifling as a hair. I wish only to know why you have
fallen out with men.

Joyce: For the best of reasons. Why, Master Pippin! they say the world
is round!

Martin: Heaven preserve us! was ever so giddy a statement? Round? Why,
the world's as full of edges as the dealings of men and women, in which
you can scarcely go a day's march