s--the "bloom" of the poets--gave a
soft shimmer to her skin of which the powder of later years is such a
palpably poor travesty; her limbs were nicely rounded and not too
fragile; her teeth, like Cleopatra's, were perfect, and although she was
a trifle smaller than her sister, she was broad across the shoulders,
and well developed.

Leonetta, as we have already seen, knew that she was attractive; but she
did not know this fact as surely and unmistakably as--say, a philosopher
looking at her did. She probably knew that she was sunburnt, for
instance; but she was not aware of the depth which the dark natural
virginal pigmentation of her neck, eyes, and knuckles, lent to the warm
tanning of her skin. She did not know how prone the philosopher is to
associate the combination of these two rich colourings with the wicked,
dusky denizens of a tropical jungle--those creatures whose blood he
suspects of being something deeper than red, who really look as if they
were made from the earth and were going back to it, and who have nothing
of that translucent pallor suggestive of heaven-sent and heaven-destined
attributes.

She probably knew her dark eyes were fine and that their lashes were
long; but she would have been surprised and perhaps even a little hurt
if she had been told that their most striking feature was that, to every
man, modest and shrewd enough to divine all that they could exact, they
were terrifying. She knew her teeth were faultless; but she did not even
suspect the thrill of pained joy that went through the philosopher's
frame when he saw the life-hunger they revealed, and, what was more, the
full deep bite and fast hold they would take of Life's entrails. A young
girl's canines are self-revelatory in this respect. Let them be big and
prominent, as Leonetta's were, and the fastness of her hold on Life,
once she has bitten, promises to break all records. The sensitive
philosopher has little patience with your fair delicate misses with
small mouse-like canines. There are too many of them to begin with, and
they are so instinctively ladylike.

Perhaps the most amusing thing in this world is to watch the antics of
a large-canined virgin _de bonne famille_ who is trying to be a
lady,--by "lady" is here meant someone who, among other parlour tricks,
can perform the feat of "controlling" her feelings,--who has, that is to
say, on the one hand "control" and on the other hand "feelings," and
whose feelings are weaker