shape beautiful though well developed.  You will understand the character of this perfection when I say that where the dazzling treasures which had so fascinated me joined the arm there was no crease or wrinkle.  No hollow disfigured the base of her head, like those which make the necks of some women resemble trunks of trees; her muscles were not harshly defined, and everywhere the lines were rounded into curves as fugitive to the eye as to the pencil.  A soft down faintly showed upon her cheeks and on the outline of her throat, catching the light which made it silken.  Her little ears, perfect in shape, were, as she said herself, the ears of a mother and a slave.  In after days, when our hearts were one, she would say to me, “Here comes Monsieur de Mortsauf”; and she was right, though I, whose hearing is remarkably acute, could hear nothing.

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, watchful as the sentinel on whom the safety of others depends and who looks for danger, there were moments when smiles would wreathe her lips and betray the happy nature buried beneath the saddened bearing that was the outcome of her life.  Her