"But powder won't make your face that funny shell-pink color," he argued. For a man of pious pursuits, it struck us, his knowledge was fairly broad.
We told him that powder was liable to make your face any shade in the spectrum. We know from personal experience. Occasionally after shaving, when our face feels more than usually lacerated, we rub some talcum on. It seems to take part of the sting out. It also covers the places on our neck where we have made futile and fumbling slashes at our jugular vein.
One morning we shook some powder out of a new tin, patted ourself with it, and then hurried down to breakfast. Our landlady looked at us with an interest and sympathy that were entirely unexpected and a little disquieting.
"Are you feeling well?" she asked, instead of demanding acrimoniously as usual what under heaven we had been doing upstairs for the last half hour or so, while the coffee was boiling itself to a poisonous consistency on the back of the stove.
We said we were perfectly all right, thanks, and would she please pass the prunes?
"But you don't look well," she persisted. "You got an awfully queer color this morning—kind of mauve."
A vague suspicion struck us that all was not well. We went over to the side-board and squinted at ourself in the silly little mirror which furniture-makers put in the back of such things. "Mauve" was right, though perhaps it would be more exact to state that we were a lovely shade of heliotrope, very decorative but rather Futurist in general effect. We looked as if we had succeeded in cutting our throat at last, and were now a pale and beautiful corpse. We suddenly recalled that our heart had been acting a little strangely of late, especially when we were introduced to new and pretty girls. Perhaps there really was something wrong with our old carburetor—or should we say our ignition system? We were scared a still paler shade of lavender.
Then we remembered the powder—somehow it hadn't seemed quite the same as the old stuff, though we had been in too much of a hurry to look closely at it. We ran upstairs and shook some of it out in our hand—it was a pretty and quite distinct violet, both as to color and perfume. Naturally there is no serious objection to smelling like a violet, but we had no ambition to have a complexion like one—we prefer that the resemblance should be confined to the beautiful modesty of our disposition.
We took the tin back to our druggist on the way down-town, and asked him with some asperity what the big idea was. We assured him that we hadn't bought the powder as part of the make-up to play the leading role at a wake, and that even in the event of our being laid out we didn't intend the dash of lavender to be so brazenly conspicuous—a little purple on our tie, perhaps, but none on our countenance.
"Oh, that's too bad," he said calmly—druggists are always calm—"I must have given you the powder for brunettes by mistake."