business of being female eyes. It was a new show to us. Our wives
and mothers had voted at city elections for over thirty years and
had been engaged for a generation in the business of taming their
husbands; saving the meat from dinner for the hash for breakfast,
and betimes for diversion, working in their clubs for the good of
their towns; and their eyes had visions in them, not sex. So these
female eyes showed us a mystery! And each of us in his heart decided
to investigate the phenomena. And on the seventh day we laid off
from our work and called it good. We had met the Princess. Our
closer view persuaded us that she might be thirty-five but probably
was forty, though one early morning in a passage way we met her
when she looked fifty, wan and sad and weary, but still flashing
her eyes. And then one fair day, she turned her eyes from us for
ever. This is what happened to me. But Henry himself may have been
the hero of the episode. Anyway, one of us was walking the deck
with the Countess investigating the kilowat power of the eyes. He
was talking of trivial things, possibly telling the lady fair of
the new ten-story Beacon Building or of Henry Ganse's golf score
on the Emporia Country Club links--anyway something of broad,
universal human interest. But those things seemed to pall on her.
So he tried her on the narrow interests that engage the women at
home--the suffrage question; the matter of the eight-hour day and
the minimum wage for women; and national prohibition. These things
left her with no temperature. She was cold; she even shivered,
slightly, but grace fully withal, as she went swinging along on
her toes, her silk sweater clinging like an outer skin to her slim
lithe body, walking like a girl of sixteen. And constantly she was
at target practice with her eyes with all her might and main. She
managed to steer the conversation to a place where she could bemoan
the cruel war; and ask what the poor women would do. Her Kansas