Little Poems in Prose

gives it an air at once triumphant and idle. Heavy earrings tinkle secretly at her dainty ears. From time to time the sea-breeze lifts her floating skirt by the corner and shows her splendid shining leg, and her foot, like the feet of the marble goddesses that Europe puts into museums, makes a faithful print of its shape on the fine sand, for Dorothy is so prodigiously coquettish that the pleasure of being admired is more to her than the pride of the freed- woman; and although she is free, she walks bare-foot. Thus she moves on, a harmony; happy in living, smiling an ivory smile as if she beheld afar off in space a mirror reflecting her move- ment and her beauty. At the hour when the very dogs groan with pain under the biting sun, what powerful mo- tive can have sent the idle Dorothy, beautiful and cold as bronze, upon her journeyings? Why has she left her coquettishly arranged little house, whose flowers and mats make so cheaply so perfect a boudoir; where she takes so much pleasure in combing her hair, in smoking, in fanning herself or in looking at herself in the mirror of her great feathered fans, while the sea, beating on the shore a hundred yards away, makes its powerful and