She had met him the previous summer on the Rhine, and now if they aren’t engaged they might as well be, said her friends, for he is her shadow wherever she goes. There was something characteristically inaccurate about that statement, for Miss Allison was rather undersized in one way and oversized in another; at least that, too, is what her friends said. She was not more than five feet in height nor less than five feet in breadth measured from tip to tip of her wings, as her brother said. Miss Allison had wings, not because she was an angel, but because it was the fashion, – wings that sprouted at her fair, plump, shapely shoulders and billowed out like balloons. Her brother Cary, above referred to, a sixteen-year-old specimen of Young American impudence and independence, said further of her, in the spring of ’94, that if Floy’s sleeves were only inflated with gas she could float on air as easily as she did on water, and on water Miss Allison was buoyancy personified. On water, too, and in her dainty bathing-dress, Miss Allison’s wings were discarded and her true proportions more accurately defined