d, inconceivable effects may be met with at night in Paris.
Only those who have amused themselves by watching those effects have
any idea how fantastic a woman may appear there at dusk. At times the
creature whom you are following, by accident or design, seems to you
light and slender; the stockings, if they are white, make you fancy that
the legs must be slim and elegant; the figure though wrapped in a shawl,
or concealed by a pelisse, defines itself gracefully and seductively
among the shadows; anon, the uncertain gleam thrown from a shop-window
or a street lamp bestows a fleeting lustre, nearly always deceptive, on
the unknown woman, and fires the imagination, carrying it far beyond
the truth. The senses then bestir themselves; everything takes color and
animation; the woman appears in an altogether novel aspect; her person
becomes beautiful. Behold! she is not a woman, she is a demon, a siren,
who is drawing you by magnetic attraction to some respectable house,
where the worthy _bourgeoise_, frightened by your threatening step and
the clack of your boots, shuts the door in your face without looking at
you.

A vacillating gleam, thrown from the shop-window of a shoemaker,
suddenly illuminated from the waist down the figure of the woman who was
before the young man. Ah! surely, _she_ alone had that swaying figure;
she alone knew the secret of that chaste gait which innocently set into
relief the many beauties of that attractive form. Yes, that was the
shawl, and that the velvet bonnet which she wore in the mornings. On
her gray silk stockings not a spot, on her shoes not a splash. The shawl
held tightly round the bust disclosed, vaguely, its charming lines; and
the young man, who had often seen those shoulders at a ball, knew well
the treasures that the shawl concealed. By the way a Parisian woman
wraps a shawl around her, and the way she lifts her feet in the street,
a man of intelligence in such studies can divine the secret of her
mysterious errand. There is something, I know not what, of quivering
buoyancy in the person, in the gait; the woman seems to weigh less; she
steps, or rather, she glides like a star, and floats onward led by a
thought which exhales from the folds and motion of her dress. The young
man hastened his step, passed the woman, and then turned back to look
at her. Pst! she had disappeared into a passage-way, the grated door of
which and its bell still rattled and sounded. The young man walked bac