s which the open-air life of Rome
gives to the Transteverine peasant-woman. Her hair,--which was abundant,
and grew, like that of her father, in points upon her forehead,--was
caught up in a twist which showed the lines of a well-set neck, and then
rippled downward in curls that were scrupulously cared for, after the
fashion of young shop-women, whose desire to attract attention inspires
the truly English minutiae of their toilet. The beauty of this young
girl was not the beauty of an English lady, nor of a French duchess,
but the round and glowing beauty of a Flemish Rubens. Cesarine had the
turned-up nose of her father, but it was piquant through the delicacy of
its modelling,--like those noses, essentially French, which have been
so well reproduced by Largilliere. Her skin, of a firm full texture,
bespoke the vitality of a virgin; she had the fine brow of her mother,
but it was clear with the serenity of a young girl who knows no care.
Her liquid blue eyes, bathed in rich fluid, expressed the tender grace
of a glowing happiness. If that happiness took from her head the poetry
which painters insist on giving to their pictures my making them a shade
too pensive, the vague physical languor of a young girl who has never
left her mother's side made up for it, and gave her a species of
ideality. Notwithstanding the graceful lines of her figure, she was
strongly built. Her feet betrayed the peasant origin of her father and
her own defects of race, as did the redness of her hands, the sign of
the thoroughly bourgeois life. Sooner or later she would grow stout. She
had caught the sentiment of dress from the elegant young women who came
to the shop, and had learned from them certain movements of the head,
certain ways of speaking and of moving; and she could play the well-bred
woman in a way that turned the heads of all the young men, especially
the clerks, in whose eyes she appeared truly distinguished. Popinot
swore that he would have no other wife than Cesarine. The liquid
brightness of that eye, which a look, or a tone of reproach, might cause
to overflow in tears, was all that kept him to a sense of masculine
superiority. The charming girl inspired love without leaving time to ask
whether she had mind enough to make it durable. But of what value is the
thing they call in Paris _mind_ to a class whose principal element of
happiness is virtue and good sense?

In her moral qualities Cesarine was like her mother, somewhat bett