would prefer him above the others; she
would attach him to herself, display all her powers of coquetry for him.
It was a fancy, such a merest Duchess's whim as furnished a Lope or a
Calderon with the plot of the _Dog in the Manger_. She would not suffer
another woman to engross him; but she had not the remotest intention of
being his.

Nature had given the Duchess every qualification for the part of
coquette, and education had perfected her. Women envied her, and men
fell in love with her, not without reason. Nothing that can inspire
love, justify it, and give it lasting empire was wanting in her. Her
style of beauty, her manner, her voice, her bearing, all combined to
give her that instinctive coquetry which seems to be the consciousness
of power. Her shape was graceful; perhaps there was a trace of
self-consciousness in her changes of movement, the one affectation that
could be laid to her charge; but everything about her was a part of her
personality, from her least little gesture to the peculiar turn of her
phrases, the demure glance of her eyes. Her great lady's grace, her
most striking characteristic, had not destroyed the very French quick
mobility of her person. There was an extraordinary fascination in her
swift, incessant changes of attitude. She seemed as if she surely would
be a most delicious mistress when her corset and the encumbering costume
of her part were laid aside. All the rapture of love surely was latent
in the freedom of her expressive glances, in her caressing tones, in the
charm of her words. She gave glimpses of the high-born courtesan within
her, vainly protesting against the creeds of the duchess.

You might sit near her through an evening, she would be gay and
melancholy in turn, and her gaiety, like her sadness, seemed
spontaneous. She could be gracious, disdainful, insolent, or confiding
at will. Her apparent good nature was real; she had no temptation to
descend to malignity. But at each moment her mood changed; she was full
of confidence or craft; her moving tenderness would give place to a
heart-breaking hardness and insensibility. Yet how paint her as she
was, without bringing together all the extremes of feminine nature? In
a word, the Duchess was anything that she wished to be or to seem.
Her face was slightly too long. There was a grace in it, and a certain
thinness and fineness that recalled the portraits of the Middle Ages.
Her skin was white, with a faint rose tint. Everything