Have you never met in the street, on the boulevards, a modest, virtuous young person out with her mother?’

‘Oh, yes, to my cost! The sight of a mother and her daughter is one of our worst tortures, it awakens a remorse hidden in the recesses of our hearts, eating us away!… I know only too well what I lack.’

‘Well, then, you know what you should look like next Sunday,’ said the priest, rising.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘before you go, teach me a real prayer, so that I can pray to God!’

It was a touching sight, that of this priest making the penitent whore repeat the Ava Maria and Paternoster in French.

‘How beautiful they are!’ said Esther when she had once gone without mistake through the two popular and magnificent expressions of Catholic faith.

‘What is your name?’ she asked the priest as he left.

‘Carlos Herrera, I am a Spaniard and banished from my country.’

Esther took his hand and kissed it. She was no longer a harlot, but a fallen angel getting up again.

A portrait Titian would have liked to paint

IN a house famous for the aristocratic and religious education received there, in early March of that year, one Monday morning, the boarders saw their pretty company augmented by a new arrival whose beauty incontestably surpassed not merely that of her companions, but the finest points of each. In France, it is extremely rare, if indeed it is not impossible, to meet the thirty celebrated perfections described in lines of Persian verse and carved, it is said, in the seraglio, which a woman needs in order to be wholly beautiful. In France, if general harmony is uncommon, ravishing details abound. As to that perfect and imposing harmony which statuary seeks to render, and which it has rendered in one or two notable compositions, such as the Diana and the Callipygian Venus, it is the privilege of Greece and Asia Minor. Esther came from this cradle of the human species, the homeland of beauty: her mother was Jewish. The Jews, though so often debased by their contact with other peoples, yet present among their numerous tribes strains in which the sublimest type of Asiatic beauty is preserved. When they are not of repulsive ugliness, they display the magnificent character of Armenian features. Esther would have carried off the prize in a seraglio, she possessed the thirty beauties harmoniously blended. Far from deleteriously affecting the fine edges of her figure, the freshness of her complexion, her odd life had given her an elusively feminine quality: no longer the closely smooth texture of green fruit, nor yet the hot bloom of maturity, the blossom was still there. A little longer spent in dissolution, she would have grown plump. That abundant health, that animal perfection of the creature in whom voluptuousness takes the place of thought must be a salient fact in the eyes of physiologists.

By a rare circumstance, if indeed it is ever found in very young girls, her hands, incomparably formed, were soft, transparent and white like those of a woman brought to bed of her second child. She had exactly the foot and the hair, so justly renowned, of the Duchesse de Berri, hair no hairdresser’s hand could hold, so abundant was it, and so long, that falling to the ground it coiled there, for Esther was of that medium height which allows a woman to be made a kind of toy, to be taken up, put down, taken up again and carried without fatigue. Her skin as fine as Chinese rice-paper, its amber warmth tinted with pink veins, had a sheen without dryness, softness without moisture. Remarkably vigorous, though delicate in appearance, Esther caught attention suddenly with a characteristic most often remarked in faces which Raphael’s pencil disengaged to perfection, for of all painters Raphael most closely studied and best rendered Jewish beauty. This marvellous feature was effected by the depth of the arch beneath which the eye turned as though liberated from its setting, its curve sharply defined as the groining of a vault. When the pure and diaphanous tints of youth and finely marked eyebrows clothe such an arch; when the light which slips into the hollow circle beneath it is all a bright rose, there are treasures of tenderness to content a lover, beauties of which a painter may despair. Those luminous recesses where the shadows take on tones of gold, this tissue fine as a ligament and flexible as the most sensitive membrane, are nature’s final achievement. The eye is at rest therein like a miraculous egg in a nest of spun silk. But in later life a frightful melancholy may afflict this marvel, when the passions have charred these thin contours, when grief has contracted this network of fibrils. Esther’s origins were betrayed by the oriental formation of her Turkish-lidded eyes, their colour a slate-grey which, in the light, caught the blue tint in the black wings of a raven. Only the extreme tenderness of her gaze dimmed their brilliance. In the eyes of the desert races alone may be seen the power to fascinate everybody, for a woman may always fascinate one or two. No doubt their eyes retain something of the infinitude they have contemplated. Can it be that nature, in her prescience, has provided their retinas with some capacity for reflecting back and thus enduring the mirage of the sands, the torrents of sunlight, the burning cobalt of the ether? or that human beings, like others, derive some quality from the surroundings among which they have been developed, and that its attributes stay with them over centuries! This great solution to the problem of race is perhaps inherent in the question itself. The instincts are living facts whose cause resides in some necessity endured. Animal species result from the exercise of these instincts. To be convinced of this truth so greatly sought, it is enough to extend to the human herd an observation recently made on flocks of Spanish and British sheep which, on lowland pastures where the grass is thick, feed close together, while they scatter on hill pastures where the grass is thin. Remove these two breeds of sheep from their native lands, transport them into Switzerland or France: the mountain sheep continues to feed alone, though in low-lying, close-grassed meadows; the valley sheep will feed close together, though on an Alp. The acquired and transmitted instinct is barely modified after several generations.