Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/132
the chop-house that night for their evening penance of lentils, and found Gloria absent! Yes, it was an odd wooing. I had found the measurements of the Venus de Milo in some Sunday paper, and that night, when we became quite sentimental, I made her promise to take her own dimensions, so that we could compare the proportions of the two. And we had some very happy little jokes, quite simple ones that she would understand, about her arms being much more lovely than those of the statue, and that sort of thing. How deliciously she blushed the next day when she gave me her list of measurements, written out on a sheet of paper. Of course, I pretended not to understand which was which. I wrote a little poem about them."
"It seems to me," I said, "that you were getting on very well. What was the trouble? You didn't marry her, did you?"
"Old man Larsen," he continued, gravely, "had a number of other hobbies besides vegetarianism and physical culture. He was a mechanical genius in his way. I remember once, after we had expressed exaggerated admiration of some atrocious compound of lentils and nuts and fruit, Gloria took us through the kitchen to show us an ingenious sandwich-making machine her father had