Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/117

 girls. If I were suddenly called upon to indicate to a son my notion of the ideal woman for a lifelong companion, I fear that I should not get beyond faltering forth a vague and most likely quite unpersuasive description of the virtues of Cornelia; and he, if he were as acute as I should like a son of my own to be, would doubtless inform me that it isn't the virtues of Cornelia that take me, but her charm, which I don't understand. At any rate, my personal curiosity was so happily and completely arrested by my first discovery of perfection that, in the twenty years which have elapsed since that time, I have never felt impelled to explore any further.

I recall, for example, that when a few years ago I visited England in order to look up the baptismal record of an Elizabethan lawyer, I met on shipboard a vivacious young Frenchwoman who had compassion on my obviously lonely state and proposed one day that we make a couple of constitutional turns around the deck. At the end of the first turn, during which I had dallied a bit with the weather in my ingenious American fashion, she shrugged her shoulders—that is, I suppose she did, for she was very French—and exclaimed, "Allons donc, causons de la