On my one hundred feet of veranda I did the best I could to reduce. I ran miles, I shadow boxed, I skipped rope, and I spent hours with the old seventeen setting-up exercises of drill regulations. Today I was shadow boxing near the right end of my veranda when I suddenly discovered the girl in the garden observing me. As our eyes met I halted in my tracks and smiled at her. A frightened look came into her eyes, and she turned and fled. I wondered why. Puzzled, I walked slowly back toward my apartment, my exercises forgotten. This time I had seen the girl’s full face, looked her squarely in the eyes, and I had been absolutely dumfounded by her beauty. Every man and woman I had seen since I had come to Venus had been beautiful; I had come to expect that. But I had not expected to see in this or any other world such indescribable perfection of coloring and features, combined with character and intelligence, as that which I had just seen in the garden beyond my little fence. But why had she run away when I smiled? Possibly she had run away merely because she had been discovered watching me for, after all, human nature is about the same everywhere. Even twenty-six million miles from earth there are human beings like ourselves and a girl, with quite human curiosity, who runs away when she is discovered. I wondered if she resembled earthly girls in other respects, but she seemed too beautiful to be just like anything on earth or in heaven. Was she young or old? Suppose she were seven hundred years old! I went to my apartment and prepared to bathe and change my loincloth; I had long since adopted the apparel of Amtor. As I glanced in a mirror that hangs in my bathroom I suddenly understood why the girl may have looked frightened and run away—my beard! It was nearly a month old now and might easily have frightened anyone who had never before seen a beard. When Danus returned I asked him what I could do about it. He stepped into another room and returned with a bottle of salve. “Rub this into the roots of the hair on your face,” he directed, “but be careful not to get it on your eyebrows, lashes, or the hair on your head. Leave it there a minute and then wash your face.” I stepped into my bathroom and opened the jar; its contents looked like vaseline and smelled like the devil, but I rubbed it into the roots of my beard as Danus had directed. When I washed my face a moment later my beard came off, leaving my face smooth and hairless. I hurried back to the room where I had left Danus. “You are quite handsome after all,” he remarked. “Do all the people of this fabulous world of which you have told me have hair growing on their faces?” “Nearly all,” I replied, “but in my country the majority of men keep it shaved off.” “I should think the women would be the ones to shave,” he commented. “A woman with hair on her face would be quite repulsive to an Amtorian.” “But our women do not have hair on their faces,” I assured him.