y by the inferiority of my position; I offered my arm to
the young lady, and the count left us to go to his room.

I was still an adept in the old Venetian fashion of attending upon
ladies, and the young countess thought me rather awkward, though I
believed myself very fashionable when I placed my hand under her arm, but
she drew it back in high merriment. Her mother turned round to enquire
what she was laughing at, and I was terribly confused when I heard her
answer that I had tickled her.

"This is the way to offer your arm to a lady," she said, and she passed
her hand through my arm, which I rounded in the most clumsy manner,
feeling it a very difficult task to resume a dignified countenance.
Thinking me a novice of the most innocent species, she very likely
determined to make sport of me. She began by remarking that by rounding
my arm as I had done I placed it too far from her waist, and that I was
consequently out of drawing. I told her I did not know how to draw, and
inquired whether it was one of her accomplishments.

"I am learning," she answered, "and when you call upon us I will shew you
Adam and Eve, after the Chevalier Liberi; I have made a copy which has
been found very fine by some professors, although they did not know it
was my work."

"Why did you not tell them?"

"Because those two figures are too naked."

"I am not curious to see your Adam, but I will look at your Eve with
pleasure, and keep your secret."

This answer made her laugh again, and again her mother turned round. I
put on the look of a simpleton, for, seeing the advantage I could derive
from her opinion of me, I had formed my plan at the very moment she tried
to teach me how to offer my arm to a lady.

She was so convinced of my simplicity that she ventured to say that she
considered her Adam by far more beautiful than her Eve, because in her
drawing of the man she had omitted nothing, every muscle being visible,
while there was none conspicuous in Eve. "It is," she added, "a figure
with nothing in it."

"Yet it is the one which I shall like best."

"No; believe me, Adam will please you most."

This conversation had greatly excited me. I had on a pair of linen
breeches, the weather being very warm.... I was afraid of the major and
the countess, who were a few yards in front of us, turning round .... I
was on thorns. To make matters worse, the young lady stumbled, one of her
shoes slipped off, and presenting me her pretty foot s