peculiar to the hairdressing-shop had assumed an extraordinary intensity, and that my right-hand nostril was in the act of being titillated by what might fairly be called the very poetry of cosmetics. Glancing that way again, I perceived the source of this rich effluvium. The hairdresser's door was open, and a person whom I took to be his wife had come to inhale upon the threshold the lighter atmosphere of the street. She stood there for some moments looking up and down, and I had time to see that she was very pretty. She wore a plain black silk dress, and one needed to know no more of millinery than most men to observe that it was admirably fitted to a charming figure. She had a little knot of pink ribbon at her throat and a bunch of violets in her rounded bosom. Her face seemed to me at once beautiful and lively—two merits that are not always united; for smiles, I have observed, are infrequent with women who are either very ugly or very pretty. Her light-brown hair was, naturally enough, dressed with consummate art, and the character of her beauty being suggestive of purity and gentleness, she looked (her black silk dress apart) like a Madonna who should have been coiffée in the Rue de la Paix. What a delightful person for a barber's wife! I thought; and I saw her sitting in the little front shop at the desk and taking the money with a gracious smile from the gentlemen who had been
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