Say, I rode for an hour in a 'rickshaw at Nagoya to see the most
beautiful girl in Japan and when we got to the teahouse they trotted out
a little shrimp that looked as if she'd been dried over a barrel--you
know, stood _bent_ all the time, as if she was getting ready to jump.
Her neck was no bigger than a gripman's wrist and she had a nose that
stood right out from her face almost an eighth of an inch. Her eyes were
set on the bias and she was painted more colors than a bandwagon. I
said, 'If this is the champion geisha, take me back to the land of the
chorus girl.' And in China! Listen! I caught a Chinese belle coming down
the Queen's Road in Hong-Kong one day, and I ran up an alley. I have
seen Parisian beauties that had a coat of white veneering over them an
inch thick, and out here in this country I have seen so-called
cracker-jacks that ought to be doing the mountain-of-flesh act in the
Ringling side-show. So there you are!"
"But in your own country, and in the larger cities of the world, there
must be some sort of standard. What are the requirements? What must a
woman be, that all men would call her beautiful?"
"Well, Princess, that's a pretty hard proposition to dope out. Good
looks can not be analyzed in a lab or worked out by algebra, because,
I'm telling you, the one that may look awful lucky to me may strike
somebody else as being fairly punk.
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