From her glistening hair of gold to the tip of her white satin slippers, with preposterously high heels, this was the new incarnation of the woman who ends the Nineteenth Century.  She was indisputably beautiful, and Claudius, who had thought that the Jewess was incomparable, feared that the apple would have to be halved, since neither could have borne it entire away.  But the Jewess’s loveliness exalted the beholder; this one’s was of the strange, irritating sort, resisted with difficulty and alluring a man into those byways which end in the gaming hell, the saturnalian halls, and the suicide’s grave.  Love had never chosen a more appetizing form to be the pivot on which human folly—­perhaps human genius—­was to spin idly and uselessly, like a beetle on a pin in a naturalist’s cabinet.

Kaiserina von Vieradlers was the modern Venus, a creation of the modiste rather than of the sculptor; though hips and bosom were developed extravagantly, the long waist was absurdly small; but no token of ill health from the tight lacing appeared in the irreproachable shape, the well-turned arms and the countenance which was unmarred in a single lineament; the movements were not strictly ladylike, they were too unfettered in spite of the smooth gloves and the stylish unwrinkled ball dress, rather short in front to parade the slippers mentioned and silk stockings so nicely moulded to the trim ankle as to show the dimple.  She was more fair in her eighteenth year—­if she were so old—­than a Danish baby in the cradle.  The yellow hair had a clear golden tint not tawny, and the fineness was remarkable of the stray threads that serpentined out of the artistic braid and drooping ringlets.  The blue eyes had a multitude of expressions and gleams; now hard as the blue diamond’s ray, now soft as the lapis lazuli’s glow of azure; the expression was at present one of longing, tender, cajoling and coaxing—­like a gentle child’s, never refused a thing for which it silently pleaded.

The costume was a trifle exaggerated, as is allowable on the minor stage, but what was that in our topsy-turvy age, when the disreputable woman in a mixed ball is conspicuous among her spotless sisters by the quiet correctness of her toilet?

Kaiserina came down to the flaring footlights, after a little trepidation, which the inexorable demon of stage-fright exacted from her, with the swing and confident step of one sure that—­while man may be unjust, cruel and oppressive to her sex off the stage—­here she would reign and finally triumph.  She bowed her head, but it was to acknowledge her gracious acceptance of the tribute of applause; she moistened her fiery-coal lips with a serpent’s active tongue; she surveyed her dominion with eyes that assumed a passing emerald tint.  There was a depth to those apparently superficial glances.  It seemed to Claudius that one had singled him out, and he fancied, as his eyes became fastened on this vision of concentrated worldly bliss, that it was for him that she stretched her plump neck, waved her arms in long gloves, undulated her waist and murmured—­though to others she was but repeating her song during the orchestral prelude: