the earliest to attract her notice.

Zenobia was truly a magnificent woman. The homely simplicity of her
dress could not conceal, nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of
her presence. The image of her form and face should have been
multiplied all over the earth. It was wronging the rest of mankind
to retain her as the spectacle of only a few. The stage would have
been her proper sphere. She should have made it a point of duty,
moreover, to sit endlessly to painters and sculptors, and preferably
to the latter; because the cold decorum of the marble would consist
with the utmost scantiness of drapery, so that the eye might chastely
be gladdened with her material perfection in its entireness. I know
not well how to express that the native glow of coloring in her
cheeks, and even the flesh-warmth over her round arms, and what was
visible of her full bust,--in a word, her womanliness incarnated,--
compelled me sometimes to close my eyes, as if it were not quite
the privilege of modesty to gaze at her. Illness and exhaustion, no
doubt, had made me morbidly sensitive.

I noticed--and wondered how Zenobia contrived it--that she had always
a new flower in her hair. And still it was a hot-house flower,--an
outlandish flower,--a flower of the tropics, such as appeared to have
sprung passionately out of a soil the very weeds of which would be
fervid and spicy. Unlike as was the flower of each successive day to
the preceding one, it yet so assimilated its richness to the rich
beauty of the woman, that I thought it the only flower fit to be worn;
so fit, indeed, that Nature had evidently created this floral gem,
in a happy exuberance, for the one purpose of worthily adorning
Zenobia's head. It might be that my feverish fantasies clustered
themselves about this peculiarity, and caused it to look more