Page:Waylaid by Wireless - Balmer - 1909.djvu/47

Rh "Miss Varris!" the young American exclaimed, with badly concealed joy.

"Mr. Preston!" a girl's clear voice returned gladly, as the trim, slender figure before them turned about. She was neither tall nor short, and she was neither athletic looking nor "soft." And she was neither beautiful nor handsome, but just at the point halfway between which a girl of twenty-three reaches who inherits good features and healthful figure, and who has learned to dance well, ride well, study enough, golf enough, and has attained the thousand other "well and enoughs" which include talking well and listening enough, and allow a woman to be liked and loved with so little consciousness that she never suspects she is particularly liked at all.

"She is the kind of girl," one of the men upon the boat had commented admiringly to Preston, "of whom the other women who do it themselves can't say that she pads, or powders, or wears other people's hair—though it is a wonder that she can have enough 29