of the gray and poorly hair. She could make a bed freshly, whitely, her
strong young arms manoeuvering under but not even jarring the poor old
form so often prone there.

There was a fine kind of virile peasantry in the willing hands, white
enough, but occasionally broken at the nails from eight hours of this
box in and that box out in a children's shoe department.

Differing by the fourteen pounds, Watteau would have scorned and Rubens
have adored to paint her.

She was not unconscious of the rather flaxen ripple of her hair, which
she wore slickly parted and drawn back, scallop by scallop, to a round
and shining mat of plaits against the back of her head. But neither was
she unconscious that she thereby enhanced the too high pitch of her
cheek-bones and the already too generous width between them. It was when
Stella Schump opened wide her eyes that she transcended the milky
fleshliness and the fact that, when she walked rapidly, her cheeks
quivered in slight but gelatinous fashion. Her eyes--they were the color
of perfect June at that high-noon moment when the spinning of the
humming-bird can be distilled to sound. Laura and Marguerite and Stella
Schump had eyes as blue as Cleopatra's, and Sappho's and Medea's must
have been green.

For reading and occasional headaches, she wore a pair of horn-rimmed
spectacles prescribed but not specially ground by the optical
department, cater-corner from the children's shoes. Upon the occasion of
their first adjustment, Romance, for the first time, had leaned briefly
into the smooth monotony of Miss Schump's day-by-day, to waft a scented,
a lace-edged, an elusive kerchief.