Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/126

none of us dared to be absent very many dinners, for fear the rest would gain some advantage with the girl. I cannot give you any conception of the humorous glamour of that time unless I insist that she was the most superbly luscious thing I have ever glimpsed; and one sees a good many covetable creatures on the streets of New York. Some of them said she was cold; that in spite of all the nutritious algebra printed on old Larsen's menus (he used to put down all sorts of preposterous formulas about starch, and albumen, and phosphorus, and proteids, and so on)—she was lacking in calories. But I know that when we sat at table, and she came round to ask if everything was all right, and leaned over us with her clear eyes, as blue as a special-delivery stamp, and that cream-white neck, and the faint glimmer of a blue ribbon shining through the hilly slopes of her blouse———Oh, well, Ben, we were young, and we ate red meat for lunch, anyway.

"I guess old man Larsen, who spent most of his time in the kitchen, encouraged her to kid us along, for he never seemed to mind our open admiration of his daughter. He probably saw that she was a bigger business asset than any number of calory charts. Every now and then he would come out and chin with us, for our party became a nightly