A beautiful Athenian was as well-proportioned, as white, and as cold, as the column of a temple. M. Mérinay has shown to me, in a book, that the Ionic column is only a woman, disguised. The portico of the Temple of Erechtée, at the Acropolis at Athens, rests upon four Athenian women of the century of Pericles. The women of to-day are little, winged beings, active, busy, and above all, thoughtful; created, not to hold temples on their heads, but to awaken genius, to engage in work, to , and to light the world with the flashes of their wit.

What we love in them, and what makes their beauty, is not regularity of features; it is the lively and mobile expression of sentiments, more delicate than ours; it is the radiation of thought around that fragile envelope, which does not suffice to contain it; it is the quick play of a speaking physiognomy What she said to me on the way, and what I replied, left no more.. I am not a sculptor, but if I knew how to use the chisel and one gave me a commission to make a statue of our epoch, I swear to you that she would have a dimple in her left cheek, and a retroussé nose.

I led Mary-Ann’s horse to the village of Castia.  than the flight of a swallow leaves on the air. Her voice was so sweet to listen to, that I probably did not listen to what she said. It was as if I were at the opera, where the music does not often permit one to hear the words. All the circumstances of that first interview made an ineffaceable impression on my mind. I have only to close my eyes to believe that I am still there. The April sun shone softly on my head. Above the path, and below, the resinous trees disseminated their aromatic odors through the air. The pines, the thugas, and the turpentine trees gave forth a harsh and acrid incense as Mary-Ann passed. She inhaled, with evident happiness, nature’s odorous largess. Her dear little nose breathed in the fragrance; her eyes, those beautiful eyes, roved from object to object with .

Seeing her so pretty, so lively, so happy, you would have said that a dryad had escaped from its wood. I can see now, the horse she rode; it was Psari, a white horse from Zimmerman’s . Her habit was black; Mrs. Simons’, which showed distinctly against the sky, was bottle-green, sufficiently eccentric to testify to her independence of taste. She also wore a black hat, of that absurd and ungraceful shape worn by men of all countries; her daughter wore the gray felt adopted by the heroines of the Fronde. Both wore chamois gloves. Mary-Ann’s hand was not small, but admirably formed. I have never worn gloves, I do not like them. And you?