"Imagine to yourself, dear reader, an exquisite and gracious creature
of five feet three. Her golden hair of that peculiar shade"--here
would follow directions enabling the reader to work it out for
himself. He was to pour some particular wine into some particular
sort of glass, and wave it about before some particular sort of a
light. Or he was to get up at five o'clock on a March morning and go
into a wood. In this way he could satisfy himself as to the
particular shade of gold the heroine's hair might happen to be. If
he were a careless or lazy reader he could save himself time and
trouble by taking the author's word for it. Many of them did.

"Her eyes!" They were invariably deep and liquid. They had to be
pretty deep to hold all the odds and ends that were hidden in them;
sunlight and shadow, mischief, unsuspected possibilities, assorted
emotions, strange wild yearnings. Anything we didn't know where else
to put we said was hidden in her eyes.

"Her nose!" You could have made it for yourself out of a pen'orth of
putty after reading our description of it.

"Her forehead!" It was always "low and broad." I don't know why it
was always low. Maybe because the intellectual heroine was not then
popular. For the matter of that I doubt if she be really popular
now. The brainless doll, one fears, will continue for many years to
come to be man's ideal woman--and woman's ideal of herself for
precisely the same period, one may be sure.

"Her chin!" A less degree of variety was permissible in her chin.
It had to be at an angle suggestive of piquancy, and it had to
contain at least the suspicion of a dimple.