Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill A NARROW ESCAPE BEING late for dinner in New York City is nothing unusual, and no attention was paid us by the guests, who had eaten through a part of the elaborate menu. No one seemed to take it amiss that I appeared at the great feast without my " wedding garments," though I felt conspicuous among those wide expanses of white shirt-bosoms. It salved my Puritan conscience, however, to find that my wife was quite modestly gowned in contrast to some of the anatomical displays of the other women. My neighbour on the right was a charming lady, with an American name which was saved from being common by hyphenation. There was a certain voluptuousness about her that spoke of warmer blood than that of New England; yet I dared not study her closely; for hers were searching eyes with strange depths, and my salad remained untasted; for who could eat salad with a Greek goddess watching him? Turning my attention to the lady on my left, I found her a very comfortable, virile type, and I was able to do full justice to the next course, in spite of the fact that she, too, looked at me. When our eyes met, she smiled, and I ventured to tell her that her name and her skull and eyes did not match. " Your name is Irish, your forehead is Slavic, and your hair is—blond." " Red, you mean," she corrected, laughing at my attempt to be polite. " Brick red—Irish red. One of my forefathers was Irish," she continued, " and he married a Polish Countess. That was before the Revolutionary War." " When an Irishman marries a Polish woman, there is sure to be war," the Greek goddess interposed; "isn't that so, Professor?" Then she asked me to look at her, and tell her whether her name and face matched. They did not; but I hardly felt at liberty to reveal the crossed strains in her racial ancest...