Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/21

Rh residuum. They made up together, for instance, some twelve feet of stature; and nothing was more discussed than the apportionment of this quantity. The sole flaw in Ida's beauty was a length and reach of arm conducive perhaps to her having so often beaten her ex-husband at billiards—a game in which she showed a superiority largely accountable, as she maintained, for the resentment finding expression in his physical violence. Billiards were her great accomplishment and the distinction her name always first produced the mention of. Notwithstanding some very long lines, everything about her that might have been large, and that in many women profited by the license, was, with a single exception, admired and cited for its smallness. The exception was her eyes, which might have been of mere regulation size, but which overstepped the modesty of nature. Her mouth, on the other hand, was barely perceptible, and odds were freely taken as to the measurement of her waist. She was a person who, when she was out—and she was always out—produced everywhere a sense of having been often seen, the sense indeed of a kind of abuse of visibility, so that it would have been, in the