overs
nor chastity. She walled herself round with pride. Men! oh, fie! a god
only would be worthy of her, or a monster. If virtue consists in the
protection of an inaccessible position, Josiana possessed all possible
virtue, but without any innocence. She disdained intrigues; but she
would not have been displeased had she been supposed to have engaged in
some, provided that the objects were uncommon, and proportioned to the
merits of one so highly placed. She thought little of her reputation,
but much of her glory. To appear yielding, and to be unapproachable, is
perfection. Josiana felt herself majestic and material. Hers was a
cumbrous beauty. She usurped rather than charmed. She trod upon hearts.
She was earthly. She would have been as much astonished at being proved
to have a soul in her bosom as wings on her back. She discoursed on
Locke; she was polite; she was suspected of knowing Arabic.

To be "the flesh" and to be woman are two different things. Where a
woman is vulnerable, on the side of pity, for instance, which so readily
turns to love, Josiana was not. Not that she was unfeeling. The ancient
comparison of flesh to marble is absolutely false. The beauty of flesh
consists in not being marble: its beauty is to palpitate, to tremble, to
blush, to bleed, to have firmness without hardness, to be white without
being cold, to have its sensations and its infirmities; its beauty is to
be life, and marble is death.

Flesh, when it attains a certain degree of beauty, has almost a claim to
the right of nudity; it conceals itself in its own dazzling charms as in
a veil. He who might have looked upon Josiana nude would have perceived
her outlines only through a surrounding glory. She would have shown
herself without hesitation to a satyr or a eunuch. She had the
self-possession of a goddess. To have made her nudity a torment, ever
eluding a pursuing Tantalus, would have been an amusement to her.

The king had made her a duchess, and Jupiter a Nereid--a double
irradiation of which the strange, brightness of this creature was
composed. In admiring her you felt yourself becoming a pagan and a
lackey. Her origin had been bastardy and the ocean. She appeared to have
emerged from the foam. From the stream had risen the first jet of her
destiny; but the spring was royal. In her there was something of the
wave, of chance, of the patrician, and of the tempest. She was well read
and accomplished. Never had a passion approached h