better to point out its defects to her maid.

"I don't want to look as if I were wound up in a sheet, but yet I want
to be left freedom of action. You can not get it into your head,
Julie, that this material will not stretch. You see now that I stoop a
little-Ah! you see it at last, that's well."

Weak minds! Is it not true, my pious friend, that there are those who
can be absorbed by such small matters? I find these preoccupations to be
so frivolous that I was pained at being even the involuntary recipient
of them, and I splashed the water with my hands to announce my presence
and put a stop to a conversation which shocked me.

"I am coming to you, Robert; get into the water. Has your sister arrived
yet?" said my cousin, raising her voice; then softly, and addressing her
maid, she added: "Yes, of course, lace it tightly. I want support."

One side of the tent was raised, and my relative appeared. I know not
why I shuddered, as if at the approach of some danger. She advanced two
or three steps on the fine sand, drawing from her fingers as she did so,
the gold rings she was accustomed to wear; then she stopped, handed
them to Julie, and, with a movement which I can see now, but which it
is impossible for me to describe to you, kicked off into the grass the
slippers, with red bows, which enveloped her feet.

She had only taken three paces, but it sufficed to enable me to remark
the singularity of her gait. She walked with short, timid steps, her
bare arms close to her sides.

She had divested herself of all the outward tokens of a woman, save the
tresses of her hair, which were rolled up in a net. As for the rest,
she was a comical-looking young man, at once slender yet afflicted by an
unnatural plumpness, one of those beings who appear to us in dreams, and
in the delirium of fever, one of those creatures toward whom an unknown
power attracts us, and who resemble angels too nearly not to be demons.

"Well, Robert, of what are you thinking? Give me your hand and help me
to get into the water."

She dipped the toes of her arched foot into the pellucid stream.

"This always gives one a little shock, but the water ought to be
delightful to-day," said she. "But what is the matter with you?--your
hand shakes. You are a chilly mortal, cousin."

The fact is, I was not trembling either through fear or cold; but on
approaching the Marchioness, the sharp perfume which emanated from
her hair went to my head, and with my de