about it in the night, and he begins it in the morning!"

"Never mind, mamma; let papa do as he likes. The good God has always
taken care of him," said Cesarine, kissing her mother and sitting down
to the piano, to let the architect know that the perfumer's daughter
was not ignorant of the fine arts.

When Grindot came in to measure the bedroom he was surprised and taken
aback at the beauty of Cesarine. Just out of her dressing-room and
wearing a pretty morning-gown, fresh and rosy as a young girl is fresh
and rosy at eighteen, blond and slender, with blue eyes, Cesarine
seemed to the young artist a picture of the elasticity, so rare in
Paris, that fills and rounds the delicate cheek, and tints with the
color adored of painters, the tracery of blue veins throbbing beneath
the whiteness of her clear skin. Though she lived in the lymphatic
atmosphere of a Parisian shop, where the air stagnates and the sun
seldom shines, her habits gave her the same advantages 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