"Cela ne vaut rien", he responded. "Une femme superbe—une taille d'imperatrice, des formes de Junon, mais une personne dont je ne voudrais ni pour femme, ni pour fille, ni pour sœur. Aussi vous ne jeterez plus un seul coup d'œil de sa côté".
"But I have looked at her a great many times while monsieur has been talking; I can see her quite well from this corner".
"Turn to the wall and study your four pictures of a woman's life".
"Excuse me, M. Paul; they are too hideous, but if you admire them, allow me to vacate my seat and leave you to their contemplation".
"Mademoiselle", he said, grimacing a half-smile, or what he intended for a smile, though it was but a grim and hurried manifestation. "You nurslings of Protestantism astonish me. You unguarded Englishwomen walk calmly amidst red-hot plowshares and escape burning. I believe, if some of you were thrown into Nebuchadnezzar's hottest furnace you would issue forth untraversed by the smell of fire".
"Will monsieur have the goodness to move an inch to one side?"
"How! At what are you gazing now? You are not recognizing an acquaintance amongst that group of jeunes gens?"
"I think so—Yes, I see there a person I know?"
In fact, I had caught a glimpse of a head too pretty to belong to any other than the redoubted Colonel de Hamal. What a very finished, highly polished little pate it was! What a figure, so trim and natty! What womanish feet and hands! How daintily he held a glass to one of his optics! with what admiration he gazed upon the Cleopatra! and then, how engagingly he tittered and whispered a friend at his elbow! Oh, the man of sense! Oh, the refined gentleman of superior taste and tact! I observed him for about ten minutes, and perceived that he was exceedingly taken with this dusk and portly Venus of the Nile. So much was I interested in his bearing, so absorbed in divining his character by his looks and movements, I temporarily forgot M. Paul; in the interim a group came between that gentleman and me, or possibly his scruples might have received another and worse shock from my present abstraction, causing him to
