the eyes every time the Princess switched them on.  And whenever he reached for the water and gulped it down, one could know he had been jolted behind his ordinary resisting power.  And he drank enough to float a ship!  As we wended our weary way over the decks during the long lonely hours of the voyage, we fell to theorizing about those eyes and we concluded that they were Latin—­Latin chiefly engaged in the business of being female eyes.  It was a new show to us.  Our wives and mothers had voted at city elections for over thirty years and had been engaged for a generation in the business of taming their husbands; saving the meat from dinner for the hash for breakfast, and betimes for diversion, working in their clubs for the good of their towns; and their eyes had visions in them, not sex.  So these female eyes showed us a mystery!  And each of us in his heart decided to investigate the phenomena.  And on the seventh day we laid off from our work and called it good.  We had met the Princess.  Our closer view persuaded us that she might be thirty-five but probably was forty, though one early morning in a passage way we met her when she looked fifty, wan and sad and weary, but still flashing her eyes.  And then one fair day, she turned her eyes from us for ever.  This is what happened to me.  But Henry himself may have been the hero of the episode.  Anyway, one of us was walking the deck with the Countess investigating the kilowat power of the eyes.  He was talking of trivial things, possibly telling the lady fair of the new ten-story Beacon Building or of Henry Ganse’s golf score on the Emporia Country Club links—­anyway something of broad, universal human interest.  But those things seemed to pall on her.  So he tried her on the narrow interests that engage the women at home—­the suffrage question; the matter of the eight-hour day and the minimum wage for women; and national prohibition.  These things left her with no temperature.  She was cold; she even shivered, slightly, but grace fully withal, as she went swinging along on her toes, her silk sweater clinging like an outer skin to her slim lithe body, walking like a girl of sixteen.  And constantly she was at target practice with her eyes with all her might and main.  She managed to steer the conversation to a place where she could bemoan the cruel war; and ask what the poor women would do.  Her Kansas partner suggested that life would be broader and better for women after the war, because they would have so much more important a part to do than before in the useful work of the world.  “Ah, yes,” she said, “perhaps so.  But with the men all gone what shall we do when we want to be petted?” She made two sweet unaccented syllables of petted in her ingenue French accent and added:  “For you know women were made to be pet-ted.”  There was a bewildered second under the machine gun fire of the eyes when her companion considered seriously her theory.  He had never cherished such a theory before.  But he was seeing a new world, and this seemed to be one of the pleasant new things in it—­this theory of the woman requiring to be pet-ted!