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 of the beautiful, lissom, strong, and harmonious figures that are still left to us in Greek marble.

As she looked down on the reflection, where she lay, with her chin resting on her hands and her elbows leaning in the thick wild thyme, a scorpion, black and hideous, ran out of the herbs and passed across the steel face of the mirror which was engraven with the figures of the Tyndarids, dear to Etruria as to Rome.

She started as the ugly dangerous insect passed over her own image.

She rose to her feet and left the steel flatterer lying amongst the dews on the ground. The scorpion remained upon its silver framework.

'Do you come to tell me that to think of my face is a sin?' she said to the beast; 'a sin as ugly and as poisonous as you?'

Joconda had always told her so; but the soul of her vigorous and brilliant youth insensibly rebelled against these austere negations of the flesh. Nature told her to rejoice in herself as the Hellenic anthologists told the beautiful boy and the virgin who stripped for the race.