Here were no jewels, no head-dresses, no velvet pile or silken sheen purity, simplicity, and aerial grace reigned in that virgin band.

Young heads simply braided, and fair forms (I was going to write _sylph_ forms, but that would have been quite untrue: several of these "jeunes filles," who had not numbered more than sixteen or seventeen years, boasted contours as robust and solid as those of a stout Englishwoman of five-and-twenty)--fair forms robed in white, or pale rose, or placid blue, suggested thoughts of heaven and angels.

I knew a couple, at least, of these "rose et blanche" specimens of humanity.

Here was a pair of Madame Beck's late pupils--Mesdemoiselles Mathilde and Angelique: pupils who, during their last year at school, ought to have been in the first class, but whose brains never got them beyond the second division.

In English, they had been under my own charge, and hard work it was to get them to translate rationally a page of _The Vicar of Wakefield_.