Arthur Stringer

“ The young scientist looked so long for the blush that she had nothing to do but hang her head before the directness of his gaze.
“I wonder why it was?” she asked dreamily, toying with a strawberry leaf.
“You wonder why you blush?” interrogated the professor.
Sybil nodded her head and moved the heaping milk pan farther down the row.
“Why, a blush is nothing more than a sudden suffusion of the facial veins due to momentary paralysis of the vaso-constrictor nerves. ”

“ That is to say, Nature still flashes her semaphoric danger signal, although for centuries and centuries not a car wheel of emergency has moved along that track, so to speak!”
“Isn't that interesting?' said Sybil, her utterance a little thick with a half-eaten strawberry. “And, after all, there isn't the slightest danger, is there?”
Stoutly and decisively the young professor assured her that there was not, and Sybil suddenly flung away a strawberry that proved to be bitter and overripe. Then she rose to her feet. ”

“ Personally, I reject Darwin's theory that a person who thinks, for instance, others are looking at her directs her attention to her own face, resulting in a flow of blood toward that part.”
“Oh!” said Sybil.
“My own theory of this most interesting of all organic and functional manifestations which accompany the simple emotions is that the blush is a vestigial remnant of the childhood of our race. I mean, that this woman's blush of yours is inherited from the twilight of time, when woman was the hunted and man the hunter——”
“But isn't that the way it still is?” interrupted the girl gently. ”

“ Even while inwardly remarking that tears seemed to be the final sedative in the feminine pharmacopœia, the younger man of science had instinctively backed away from that scene, not a little affected by the sudden discovery of some deeper current of feeling beyond the rippling shallows of adolescent light-heartedness. ”