and often with similar expressions and
features: a delicate nose, a bow-shaped, smiling mouth, intelligent eyes
with no mysterious depths, dimpled cheeks, a string of pearls round the
neck, a loosely-tied kerchief just revealing a swelling bosom, wanton
curls dancing against a dark background in a frame of roses upheld by
Cupids. And the quiver and the arrows and the flying ribbons and the
turtle-doves: all this, joined to the letters, the maxims or the verses,
often grave or even sad, sometimes calm and reasonable, sometimes
passionate, brings before us in a few strokes the harmonious picture of
woman's life.

"It is no longer the fashion in these days," murmured Blanche. "And yet
is there not an intimate relation between a woman's work and her
appearance?"

"That is the reason, no doubt," replied Marcienne, "why it seems, unlike
man's, to grow smaller as it passes out of the present. We see the
immortal pages disappear like the fallen petals of a flower. It's sad,
don't you think?"

Struck with the beauty of her closing words, we listened to her in
silence. She continued to turn the leaves at random and resumed:

"But, oh, the exquisite art which a woman's work can show when she is
not only beautiful, but truly wise, when a lovely hand indites stately
verse, when a life holds or breathes nothing but high romance ... and
love! For it is love and love alone that makes a woman's brain
conceive."

Cecilia, who was gradually losing her shyness, made a gesture to silence
us and said, slowly:

"I'll tell you something!"

A general peal of laughter greeted this phrase with which the young
Dutchwoman, according to the custom of her country, always ushers in her
least words. To make yourself better understood by slow and absent
minds, is it not well to give a warning? It is a sort of little spring
that goes off first and arouses people's attention. Then the thought is
there, ready for utterance. And sometimes, amid the silence, an
announcement is made that it will be fine to-morrow, or that it is hot
and that a storm is threatening.

But Cecilia is much too clever to cast aside those little mannerisms of
her native race which so charmingly accentuate her special type of
beauty. So she joined in our laughter with a good grace and, after
repeating her warning, observed, in her hesitating language, that, by
thus admitting ourselves to be the mere creatures of love, we were
justifying the opinion of the men who treat us