and also a little pleasanter to behold. For her angles were clothing
themselves into curves, and she was learning, perhaps from the Little
Playmate, to leave off bouncing into a room like a cow at the trot, and
to walk in sedately instead. By-and-by I knew she would come sailing down
the street like a towered galleon from the isles of Ind. For all that,
she looked not ill--an academic study for Juno, one might say. But to
make love to--why, as Helene was wont to remark, _Feech!_

And the curious thing about Katrin Texel was that though her corporeal
part might be a direct inheritance from her Burgomeister father and his
substantial brewery, her spirit had been designed for an artful fairy of
half her size, in order that it might go pirouetting into airy realms of
the imagination. For she was gay enough and lightsome enough in her
demeanor. She came in with a skip which would have been entrancing in
some elfish mignonne who could dance light-foot on spring flowers without
crushing them. But when this our solid Burgomagisterial Katrin tripped
in, it nearly drove me wild with mirth. For it was as if some bland
maternal cow out of the pasture had skipped with a hop and a circle of
flying skirts into a ballroom or a butterfly of two hundred pounds'
weight had taken to flitting from flower to flower.

And this Katrin talked in a quick, light voice, with ups and downs and
skips and quivers in it, as spring-heeled as a chamois goat on the
mountains of the south.

"Ah, Tiny-chen," she would cry, as she came undulating and cooing in to
our Helene, "is it you, dearest? 'Tis as sweet to see you as for birds to
kiss on bough! I have danced all day in the sunshine just to think that I
should come to see you! And tell me why you have not been to visit me.
Ah, bad one--cruelest--as cruel as she is pretty" (appealing to me), "is