The most courtly dame might have envied her fine and taper fingers, and
fancied she could improve them by protecting them against the sun, or by
rendering them snowy white with paste or cosmetic, but this was
questionable; nothing certainly could improve the small foot and
finely-turned ankle, so well displayed in the red hose and smart little
yellow buskin, fringed with gold. A stomacher of scarlet cloth, braided
with yellow lace in cross bars, confined her slender waist. Her robe was
of carnation-coloured silk, with wide sleeves, and the gold-fringed
skirt descended only a little below the knee, like the dress of a modern
Swiss peasant, so as to reveal the exquisite symmetry of her limbs. Over
all she wore a surcoat of azure silk, lined with white, and edged with
gold. In her left hand she held a red pink as an emblem of the season.
So enchanting was her appearance altogether, so fresh the character of
her beauty, so bright the bloom that dyed her lovely checks, that she
might have been taken for a personification of May herself. She was
indeed in the very May of life--the mingling of spring and summer in
womanhood; and the tender blue eyes, bright and clear as diamonds of
purest water, the soft regular features, and the merry mouth, whose
ruddy parted lips ever and anon displayed two rows of pearls, completed
the similitude to the attributes of the jocund month.

Her handmaidens, both of whom were simple girls, and though not
destitute of some pretensions to beauty themselves, in nowise to be
compared with her, were at the moment employed in knotting the ribands
in her hair, and adjusting the azure surcoat.

Attentively watching these proceedings sat on a stool, placed in a
corner, a little girl, some nine or ten years old, with a basket of
flowers on her knee. The child was very diminutive, even for her age,
and her smallness was increased by personal deformity, occasioned by