ngenue
among the naiads, a truant from her river spring, could have been shyer,
whiter, more ingenuous than this young girl, seemingly about sixteen
years old, ignorant of evil and of the storms of life, and fresh from
some church in which she must have prayed the angels to call her to
heaven before the time. Only in Paris are such natures as this to be
found, concealing depths of depravity behind a fair mask, and the most
artificial vices beneath a brow as young and fair as an opening flower.

At first the angelic promise of those soft lineaments misled the
friends. Raphael and Emile took the coffee which she poured into the
cups brought by Aquilina, and began to talk with her. In the eyes of the
two poets she soon became transformed into some sombre allegory, of
I know not what aspect of human life. She opposed to the vigorous
and ardent expression of her commanding acquaintance a revelation
of heartless corruption and voluptuous cruelty. Heedless enough to
perpetrate a crime, hardy enough to feel no misgivings; a pitiless demon
that wrings larger and kinder natures with torments that it is incapable
of knowing, that simpers over a traffic in love, sheds tears over a
victim's funeral, and beams with joy over the reading of the will.
A poet might have admired the magnificent Aquilina; but the winning
Euphrasia must be repulsive to every one--the first was the soul of sin;
the second, sin without a soul in it.

"I should dearly like to know," Emile remarked to this pleasing being,
"if you ever reflect upon your future?"

"My future!" she answered with a laugh. "What do you mean by my future?
Why should I think about something that does not exist as yet? I never
look before or behind. Isn't one day at a time more than I can concern
myself with as it is? And besides, the future, as we know, means the
hospital."

"How can you forsee a future in the hospital, and make no effort to
avert it?"

"What is there so alarming about the hospital?" asked the terrific
Aquilina. "When we are neither wives nor mothers, when old age draws
black stockings over our limbs, sets wrinkles on our brows, withers up
the woman in us, and darkens the light in our lover's eyes, what could
we need when that comes to pass? You would look on us then as mere
human clay; we with our habiliments shall be for you like so much
mud--worthless, lifeless, crumbling to pieces, going about with the
rustle of dead leaves. Rags or the daintiest finery will