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eyes, with their regular drawing! How they themselves declare their tranquil joy! Sometimes eyes like these seem to be inhabited by spirits. They close, and I see the horizontal lashes, the lower lid, which just rests against the upper. I see as a whole the soft oval of these long eyes, the double circle of the lids themselves, and the circle beneath, so modest now, but which one calls the circle of love.

The eyeball in moving shows the clear pupil, and all about it press the circles of the delicate lids. The soul finds a refuge in these secret hiding-places, and throws out its circles of attraction like a lasso. This sensual soul is the soul of beautiful portraits.

The cheeks curve against the socket of the eye; the double arch of the brows prolongs itself back of them. The surface of the cheeks extends to the extremity of the nose, forms a double depression by the sinking of the cheek, which grows hollow toward the convex lip, and surrounds the mouth and the two lips. These facial lines and surfaces all stop at the chin, toward which all the curves converge.

The facial expressions proceed from, spread, and move in another circle. They all disappear in the cheeks, just as do the movements of the mouth. One curve passes down from the ear to the mouth; a small curve draws back the mouth and also the nose a little. A circle passes under the nose, the chin, to the cheek-bones; a deep curve, which starts back to the cheek-bone, cuts in a small hollow to the eyebrow. The features are distinct; but when they move, they merge into one another. The smile passes over the face by a circle defining the mouth. The edge of the mouth is defined by a mezzotint at the point of union.

The loose hair surrounds the cheek, and the head seems like a golden fleece on a distaff. It hangs like loosened garlands. How beautifully these garlands of hair are arranged, with the profile in a three-quarter view, standing out against the fine, tawny hair! The impressive harmony between the flesh and the hair! They seem altogether in accord; they lend each other languor and charm; they are united and separated at the same time. These drooping clusters of chestnut-blond hair are a frame. One might call them long flowers hanging from the edge of a vase.

The neck no longer holds erect the head, which moves in ecstasy. It drowns itself in the wavy flow of hair, which becomes undone at the moment. This inundation of hair, so to say, what a generalized expression of opulence it is! Before its beauty I feel imbued with love. I am seized with enthusiasm aflame with it. This gold, this dull copper, are like a field of grain, a field of corn, where the sheaves are of gold bound together. These sheaves, slightly disordered in their lengthening curves, turning in all directions, imitate the tone of subdued flesh tints.

In this veil, transparent and colored like a dead leaf, the ear is hidden in this shadow, where the hair flies back at random in strands, twists about, and re

turns.

O head, beautiful ornament, drooping against the edge of the couch like a lovely motive in architecture at the edge of a console! You express the prolonged weakness of a lovely languor. The shoulder extends its beautiful curve before the face, resting on its side; the line rises, passes near the nose, descends, and shows the red line of the mouth, just as the bees continually enter and go out of the opening of the hive. The face turns, but the eye returns to me, passes by me, and again gazes

upon me.

In it there is the softness of the dog's eye, a spirit which becomes motionless when the tyranny of passion has disappeared. When passion is in control, she sucks like a vampire that delicate flesh, which is the model of calm, the exquisite remainder of calm.

This crown of beauty is not made for one woman alone, but for all women. They do not know it, and yet all in turn attain this beauty, as a fruit ripens. This calm is more potent in them than in the most beautiful statues. They are unaware of it, and the men who are near them are unaware of it also. They have not been taught to admire. They have not been educated in the science of admiration.

When, in the galleries of the Louvre, magnificent rooms where are gathered the collections of antiques, day enters through the windows and lightly touches these beautiful sculptures which are the adornment of great palaces, do they understand any better? Do they realize the collaboration between the sculptor and the light?

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Do they perceive this extension of the human spirit which projects its endowments upon eternity? Do they really grasp all the beauty of the Venus of Milo, directly at the end of that magnificent hall, which extends in a long profile, and is the immutable temple of woman? When the rich shadow, gradually grow

ing less, reaches the torso and falls upon it, man has need of all his genius to understand this delicate encounter, to seize the instant when the stone of the bosom welcomes and catches this softer, larger shadow; where, in infinite harmony, that torso reigns in a splendor that proclaims. the eternity of our race.

FRIDAY

BY ZONA GALE

Author of "Romance Island," "Mothers to Men," etc.

HEMPEL had watched the hands of The officer lifted his chin in the first

the clock make all the motions

the hour, from the trim segment of eleven to the lazy down-stretch of twenty minutes past, the slim erectness of the halfhour, the promising angles of the three quarters, ten, five to twelve, and last the unanimity and consummation of noon.

Before all the whistles had ceased he was on the street. It was Thursday, but he was going home; he had told them that he must get home. He had even told one of them why he must get home. "Look alive!" he wanted to shout to somebody. "She may be going through it now." Only of course there was nobody to whom a man could shout a thing like that, so he sent the message flooding through all the little secret cells that faithfully worked to let him hurry. Thus he dashed through West Twenty-eighth Street, and came to a halt at Fifth Ave

nue.

A procession was passing.

"Hold on, young fellow," an officer said, serene in the law's backing of constituted authority for easy familiarity. "Can't you see the doin's?"

"But I must-I must! I tell you I must!" Hempel cried. And when the thick neck continued to shake the great, faintly smiling face, Hempel, the boy, stepped close to the policeman and said something to him, man to man.

half of a nod, passed the business on to his eyebrows, and threw his glance down the

avenue.

"Set tight, then," he said, "till I tip you the go."

So Hempel waited on the curb, For the first time his eye took in the procession passing, and he saw that the paraders were women. At first this fact made on him small impression. him small impression. Then he found himself thinking:

"These women here are well and strong, and she may be dying." But that thought he put violently away, and seized on something, anything, to crowd it back. So he fixed his mind on the women.

Some were young, ruddy, erect; some were young, narrow-chested, stooped; some were old, and dragged their feet; one who passed near Hempel scuffled at every step. But, decently or shabbily or showily dressed, all were looking up, intent on something.

"What's the matter with 'em?" Hempel asked.

"That there big fire," the policeman answered-"that there last factory fire. It et into 'em some. These are striking; a grand sight o' good it 'll do 'em."

Hempel looked at them now with a new impression. He too had shuddered at that thing-the flimsy loft, the locked doors, the broken bodies, the charred re

mains. Poor things, trying to earn their living! He straightened his young shoulders. She did n't have to do that. Thank God! he had saved her from this kind of thing. That poor young creature there, carrying the heavy pole of a rude banner: GIVE US THE CHANCE TO SAY HOW WE WORK, it said. Already the girl was dropping with weariness. Every day must be to her weariness. But the girl's face was intent on something, as the faces of all were intent. Letty was there in the flat, just waiting. But she might be going through it now, and he three miles away from her. Even as he turned fiercely on the policeman, he saw the gray helmet execute a mighty nod.

And

"Skin!" said the officer, and through a break in the ranks Hempel tore across the avenue and fled toward the subway.

As he ran, a sickening thought swept him. It was true that Letty need never march like that,-she was safe, with him to work for her, but suppose it should be a girl-Hempel shrank abashed from "daughter"-suppose it should be a girl, and she should go to work sometime! "O God!" something in him said as he ran, "I wanted a boy. Here's another reason. Let it be a boy!"

The little flat was very still as Hempel fitted his key. He had dreaded finding some alien confusion. Now the silence seemed more ominous. He ran tiptoeing across the passage and turned the knob. The afternoon sun flooded the sittingroom. In the willow rocker his wife sat sewing.

"Letty!" he cried. "I thought may

be-"

"Not yet," she said, and one moment smiled up at him, the next caught at a button of his coat with a whimpering breath. "Dicko, I'm so glad you 've come!" he heard her say.

Instead of going into the dark diningroom, the noisy, loud-voiced, kindly maid, a luxury which they had never known until of late, brought a covered dish or two to Letty's sewing-table, and they ate by the window, in the sun. A book lay open on the window-sill. Some one had sent in a pink hyacinth. A child in a red dress was playing with two colored balls in the street below. When luncheon was finished, the well-being in the small, bright

room, and the thrilling suspense of the time, possessed Hempel as the chief fact in life. He looked at his wife in her gray gown and cap of lace, at her soft, white work. She was so little! He stretched out his big, brown hand, and laid it on her knee.

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"Letty," he said, "see me, strong as an ox; and it does n't help any.' She looked at him strangely, beautifully.

"Strength is n't the only thing," she said. "I was thinking that just when you came in. I'd found something—”

She took up the book on the windowsill. Sometimes the things which she read to him from books had made Hempel uneasy with the sense that he was not seeing in them what she saw; then gradually he had grown to feel that very likely she saw more than was really there. But now he felt that in this hour whatever she had found would be there for him, too. He followed her, even when he began to perceive that what she was reading aloud was verse, which someway always confused him, like several exposures on the same film. But this, he understood quickly, was man's verse, man's talk, straight from the shoulder:

"Force rules the world still,
Has ruled it, shall rule it;
Meekness is weakness,
Strength is triumphant,
Over the whole earth
Still it is Thor's Day!"

"Bully!" said Hempel, spontaneously.
She shook her head, smiling.
"It is n't true," she said.

"What is n't?" asked Hempel.

"Well," she said, "there 's something else. It is n't just strength that 's going to pull me through to-night, if it's tonight. It's something else-something that 's weak and great and small, not a bit like strength, Dicko."

He wondered what she meant. He reached out, and took in his somewhat roughened fingers a hem of the soft, white stuff of her work. He saw that it was a little skirt. A strange sweetness ran current with his blood.

"Strength is the greatest thing in the world though, I guess, Letty," he was saying.

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