In spite of her thick red lips, a sign of great kindliness, the forehead revealed too great a lack of ideas to allow of the heart being guided by intellect; she was evidently benevolent without grace.

How severely we reproach Virtue for its defects, and how full of indulgence we all are for the pleasanter qualities of Vice! Chestnut hair of extraordinary length gave to Rose Cormon's face a beauty which results from vigor and abundance,--the physical qualities most apparent in her person.

In the days of her chief pretensions, Rose affected to hold her head at the three-quarter angle, in order to exhibit a very pretty ear, which detached itself from the blue-veined whiteness of her throat and temples, set off, as it was, by her wealth of hair.

Seen thus in a ball-dress, she might have seemed handsome.

Her protuberant outlines and her vigorous health did, in fact, draw from the officers of the Empire the approving exclamation,-- "What a fine slip of a girl!" But, as years rolled on, this plumpness, encouraged by a tranquil, wholesome life, had insensibly so ill spread itself over the whole of Mademoiselle Cormon's body that her primitive proportions were destroyed.