He looked at her.

"Heavens, how beautiful you are! What chic!"

"Yes, I have a new frock. Do you think it pretty?"

"Charming, and perfectly harmonious. We can certainly say that nowadays
it is possible to give expression to the lightest textiles."

He walked around her, gently touching the material of the gown,
adjusting its folds with the tips of his fingers, like a man that knows
a woman's toilet as the modiste knows it, having all his life employed
his artist's taste and his athlete's muscles in depicting with slender
brush changing and delicate fashions, in revealing feminine grace
enclosed within a prison of velvet and silk, or hidden by snowy laces.
He finished his scrutiny by declaring: "It is a great success, and it
becomes you perfectly!"

The lady allowed herself to be admired, quite content to be pretty and
to please him.

No longer in her first youth, but still beautiful, not very tall,
somewhat plump, but with that freshness which lends to a woman of forty
an appearance of having only just reached full maturity, she seemed like
one of those roses that flourish for an indefinite time up to the moment
when, in too full a bloom, they fall in an hour.

Beneath her blonde hair she possessed the shrewdness to preserve all the
alert and youthful grace of those Parisian women who never grow old; who