Her arms were beautiful. The curved fingers of the hand were long, and
the flesh projected at the side beyond the finger-nails, like those of
antique statues. I should displease you, I know, if you were not
yourself an exception to my rule, when I say that flat waists should
have the preference over round ones. The round waist is a sign of
strength; but women thus formed are imperious, self-willed, and more
voluptuous than tender. On the other hand, women with flat waists are
devoted in soul, delicately perceptive, inclined to sadness, more
truly woman than the other class. The flat waist is supple and
yielding; the round waist is inflexible and jealous.

You now know how she was made. She had the foot of a well-bred woman,
--the foot that walks little, is quickly tired, and delights the eye
when it peeps beneath the dress. Though she was the mother of two
children, I have never met any woman so truly a young girl as she. Her
whole air was one of simplicity, joined to a certain bashful
dreaminess which attracted others, just as a painter arrests our steps
before a figure into which his genius has conveyed a world of
sentiment. If you recall the pure, wild fragrance of the heath we
gathered on our return from the Villa Diodati, the flower whose tints
of black and rose you praised so warmly, you can fancy how this woman
could be elegant though remote from the social world, natural in
expression, fastidious in all things which became part of herself,--in
short, like the heath of mingled colors. Her body had the freshness we
admire in the unfolding leaf; her spirit the clear conciseness of the
aboriginal mind; she was a child by feeling, grave through suffering,
the mistress of a household, yet a maiden too. Therefore she charmed
artlessly and unconsciously, by her way of sitting down or rising, of
throwing in a word or keeping silence. Though habitually collected,