“It is no real gain to know how to make them bring the proper kind of flowers and confectionery, if you have to spend the money thus saved on the beauty doctor; yes, that is true,” sighed the brown-eyed blonde. “Widowers, or men who have been engaged several times, are often nice,” said the girl with the eyeglasses. “Thank you,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin. “I like to do my own training, if it is troublesome. You can’t persuade a widower that his late wife was not a type of all womanhood, and that is horrid, especially if she happens to have had a taste for domestic magazines and molasses candy! That is why a widower is so much less attractive than a widow; she—” “Has learned that men, save for a few leading traits, are all different,” said the girl with the classic profile. “Yes, matrimony always widens a woman’s views of the opposite sex, while it narrows those of a man.” “Oh, dear,” said the girl with the Roman nose; “I do wish men would not do one thing and say another. Now, they are always praising domesticity in women, as well as shrinking modesty, and yet—” “They always overlook the domestic kind of a girl when she does venture among people,” broke in the brown-eyed blonde. “I know it, and as for shyness and modesty, it is only the girl who is bold enough to call attention to those qualities in herself who receives a social reward for them.” “Oh, well,” said the president, “a man with a couple of sisters learns a great deal about the sex.” “Humph!” said the girl with the eyeglasses. “I don’t know why it is, but the more sisters a man has, the slower he is to enter into matrimony.” “I’ve noticed that myself,” said the girl with the classic profile; “while girls who have plenty of brothers usually marry before they are twenty.” “Pshaw! That is because the friends of their brothers get a chance to see them sew on buttons and make caramels,” said the girl with the Roman nose. “No, it isn’t,” said the girl with the dimple in her chin, “it is because such a girl has more than one person to oppose the man who wants to marry her. But talk about masculine inconsistency! It sets me wild to hear men talk about domesticity and modesty and all that, and then hang about Kate, a girl who doesn’t know a frying pan from a—a camera, and who had as lief ask for a thing she wants as to hint for it—so unfeminine!” “I know it,” said the girl with the eyeglasses. “Why, she never has to buy a flower, and as for candy, she has so much that she actually shares it with the other girls! I go to see her more frequently in Lent, because my conscience will not allow me to buy any then, and—” “And Kate has been engaged six times; she told me so herself,” said the girl with the eyeglasses. “I declare, it is enough to make a girl—” “H’m!” said the president. “Don’t forget, my dears, that while she has been engaged six times, she has not been married once!”