It was the crowning ornament to the scene, the stamp
of the sovereign, the lamp of the Pharos, the flag of the tower. The
party dispersed, and the Duke, after joining a quadrille with Lady
Caroline, wandered away to make himself generally popular.
As he was moving along, he turned his head; he started.
'Ah!' exclaimed his Grace.
The cause of this sudden and ungovernable exclamation can be no other
than a woman. You are right. The lady who had excited it was advancing
in a quadrille, some ten yards from her admirer. She was very young;
that is to say, she had, perhaps, added a year or two to sweet
seventeen, an addition which, while it does not deprive the sex of the
early grace of girlhood, adorns them with that indefinable dignity which
is necessary to constitute a perfect woman. She was not tall, but as she
moved forward displayed a figure so exquisitely symmetrical that for a
moment the Duke forgot to look at her face, and then her head was turned
away; yet he was consoled a moment for his disappointment by watching
the movements of a neck so white, and round, and long, and delicate,
that it would have become Psyche, and might have inspired Praxiteles.
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