ful and easy that for a
moment it seemed as if it were a member of the "highest life" who had
blundered off the street into this strange world.

From her glistening hair of gold to the tip of her white satin slippers,
with preposterously high heels, this was the new incarnation of the
woman who ends the Nineteenth Century. She was indisputably beautiful,
and Claudius, who had thought that the Jewess was incomparable, feared
that the apple would have to be halved, since neither could have borne
it entire away. But the Jewess's loveliness exalted the beholder; this
one's was of the strange, irritating sort, resisted with difficulty and
alluring a man into those byways which end in the gaming hell, the
saturnalian halls, and the suicide's grave. Love had never chosen a more
appetizing form to be the pivot on which human folly--perhaps human
genius--was to spin idly and uselessly, like a beetle on a pin in a
naturalist's cabinet.

Kaiserina von Vieradlers was the modern Venus, a creation of the modiste
rather than of the sculptor; though hips and bosom were developed
extravagantly, the long waist was absurdly small; but no token of ill
health from the tight lacing appeared in the irreproachable shape, the
well-turned arms and the countenance which was unmarred in a single
lineament; the movements were not strictly ladylike, they were too
unfettered in spite of the smooth gloves and the stylish unwrinkled ball
dress, rather short in front to parade the slippers mentioned and silk
stockings so nicely moulded to the trim ankle as to show the dimple. She
was more fair in her eighteenth year--if she were so old--than a Danish
baby in the cradle. The yellow hair had a clear golden tint not tawny,
and the fineness was remarkable of the stray threads that serpentined
out of the artistic braid and drooping ringlets. The blue eyes had a
multitude of expressions and gleams; now hard as the blue diamond's ray,
now soft as the lapis lazuli's glow of azure; the expression was at
present one of longing, tender, cajoling and coaxing--like a gentle
child's, never refused a thing for which it silently pleaded.

The costume was a trifle exaggerated, as is allowable on the minor
stage, but what was that in our topsy-turvy age, when the disreputable
woman in a mixed ball is conspicuous among her spotless sisters by the
quiet correctness of her toilet?

Kaiserina came down to the flaring footlights, after a little
trepidation, which the inex