She was not unconscious of the rather flaxen ripple of her hair, which she wore slickly parted and drawn back, scallop by scallop, to a round and shining mat of plaits against the back of her head. But neither was she unconscious that she thereby enhanced the too high pitch of her cheek-bones and the already too generous width between them. It was when Stella Schump opened wide her eyes that she transcended the milky fleshliness and the fact that, when she walked rapidly, her cheeks quivered in slight but gelatinous fashion. Her eyes--they were the color of perfect June at that high-noon moment when the spinning of the humming-bird can be distilled to sound. Laura and Marguerite and Stella Schump had eyes as blue as Cleopatra's, and Sappho's and Medea's must have been green. For reading and occasional headaches, she wore a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles prescribed but not specially ground by the optical department, cater-corner from the children's shoes. Upon the occasion of their first adjustment, Romance, for the first time, had leaned briefly into the smooth monotony of Miss Schump's day-by-day, to waft a scented, a lace-edged, an elusive kerchief. "You ought to heard, mamma, that fellow over in the specs, when he gimme the test for the glasses." "What?" "Tee-hee!--it sounds silly to repeat it." "You got the Schump eyes, Stella. I always used to say, with his big blue ones, your poor father ought to been a girl, too." "'Say,' he said to me, he said, just like that, 'I know a society who will pay you a big fat sum if you'll sign over them eyes for post-mortem laboratory work. Believe me, Bettina,' he said, just like that, 'those are some goo-goos!'" "'Goo-goos'?" "Yes, ma--the way I look out of them." "See, Stella, if you'd only mix with the young men and not be so stiff-like with them. See! Is he the sober, genteel kind who could sit out an evening in a self-respectin' girl's front parlor?" "I--I can't ask a fellow if he didn't ask me, can I? I can't make a pusher out of myself." "A girl don't have to make a pusher out of herself to have beaus; it's natural for her to have them in moderation. I don't want my girl shut out of her natural pleasures." "'Believe me, Bettina,' he said, 'those are some goo-goos'--just like that, he said it." "Before I'd let a girl like Cora Kinealy have all the beaus! I bet _she'd_ ask him." "It--it just ain't in me, ma. The other girls do, I know--you ought to heard the way Mabel Runyan was kiddin' a fellow in the silks to-day--it just ain't in me to." "Nowadays, young men got to be made to feel welcome." "I just don't seem to take." "'I'll be pleased to have you call of a Saturday night, Mr. So-and-so.' No one could say there's anything but the genteel in that. Those are just the words I used to say to your poor father when he was courtin'." "If only I--I wouldn't turn all red!" "I bet Cora Kinealy would have asked him." "I--I'll ask him, ma."