at your feet.

Or is it Adam, his rib taken from his side in sleep, and thus
transformed, to make him behold his Paradise, and lose it?...

The youth looked on her with as glowing an eye. It was the First Woman
to him.

And she--mankind was all Caliban to her, saving this one princely youth.

So to each other said their changing eyes in the moment they stood
together; he pale, and she blushing.

She was indeed sweetly fair, and would have been held fair among rival
damsels. On a magic shore, and to a youth educated by a System, strung
like an arrow drawn to the head, he, it might be guessed, could fly
fast and far with her. The soft rose in her cheeks, the clearness of her
eyes, bore witness to the body's virtue; and health and happy blood were
in her bearing. Had she stood before Sir Austin among rival damsels,
that Scientific Humanist, for the consummation of his System, would have
thrown her the handkerchief for his son. The wide summer-hat, nodding
over her forehead to her brows, seemed to flow with the flowing heavy
curls, and those fire-threaded mellow curls, only half-curls, waves
of hair call them, rippling at the ends, went like a sunny red-veined
torrent down her back almost to her waist: a glorious vision to the
youth, who embraced it as a flower of beauty, and read not a feature.
There were curious features of colour in her face for him to have read.
Her brows, thick and brownish against a soft skin showing the action of
the blood, met in the bend of a bow, extending to the temples long and
level: you saw that she was fashioned to peruse the sights of earth,
and by the pliability of her brows that the wonderful creature used her
faculty, and was not going to be a statue to the gazer. Under the dark
thick brows an arch of lashes shot out, giving a wealth of darkness to
the full frank blue eyes, a mystery of meaning--more than brain was ever
meant to fathom: richer, henceforth, than all mortal wisdom to Prince
Ferdinand. For when nature turns artist, and produces contrasts of
colour on a fair face, where is the Sage, or what the Oracle, shall
match the depth of its lightest look?

Prince Ferdinand was also fair. In his slim boating-attire his figure
looked heroic. His hair, rising from the parting to the right of his
forehead, in what his admiring Lady Blandish called his plume, fell away
slanting silkily to the temples across the nearly imperceptible upward
curve of his brows there--felt more than seen,