Now that sort of rattling talk is admirably calculated to dissipate metapsychic puzzles into thin air. I was exceedingly grateful to Mrs. Hutchinson. From that moment dated my lasting admiration for her dear, outspoken, open-hearted qualities. Excellent soul! She was trustworthy as oak, and quite as dense to anything beyond the circle of her comprehension. The two young boobies gazing so pathetically at each other were enabled in the interim to recover their speech and their every-day faculties. Karl’s eyes kindled with a friendly interest which threatened developments, and Maggie gazed at him with a smiling, fawn-like wistfulness calculated to drive any heart-whole and well-regulated young man frantic in five minutes by the clock. It was my first actual, if vicarious, acquaintance with that pleasant malady known as love at first sight, and, judging by the symptoms of this well-matched pair, the disease is one which, like measles in childhood, is calculated to do the cynic good. I suppose it is my duty, right here, as Hooper would say, to describe Maggie Hutchinson. I would prefer to give a definition of the differential calculus--one can hunt up these things so readily in any work of reference--but to what encyclopedia can a man turn when he wishes to limn in mere words the elusive charms of a beautiful, well-educated girl, in whom a delightful femininity is blended with the rare artistic temperament--blended, too, with the deftness of a skilled gardener who grafts one lovely and sweet-scented plant on another? If the human soul were ever visible to our mortal senses it must most nearly attain tangible form in fragrant young womanhood. Every artist who seeks inspiration in nature, every poet who writes a stanza to Spring or the Dawn, knows that this is so. And that is why it is not good for mankind that woman should, by training or environment, weaken the God-given maternal instinct which is the golden halo of the Madonna. Some such thought came to me when I first set eyes on Maggie Hutchinson. She realized an ideal and that is saying much. Not that she was so strikingly handsome that men must stare and women sniff merely because she passed, nor that her pose of head and general shapeliness would have enraptured a Greek sculptor. No, I am compelled to state that by the generality of critics Maggie would only be placed among the nondescript “good-looking” section of young ladies, and she might, or might not, be molded like the Capuan Venus for all that her orthodox “tailor-built” (that is the right description, I believe) traveling costume revealed.