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"Ah, yes: we are all expectant."

"Emma is something of a littérateur, and writes poetry," a slender fair-haired young man beside me explained.

An exception to the universal custom took place. She made no bashful excuses.

"As you like," she said.

With exquisite grace in every movement, she rose from the sofa, and traversed the studio slowly, that we might feast our enchanted eyes on the spectacle of that fairy-like beauty.

Enamoured, not unlike Narcissus, of her own goodly form, and radiant with her lofty queen-like head, her shoulders moulded as perfectly as a Greek statue, her cream-hued limbs just visible beneath the clinging tissue that she wore—she came to a standstill opposite me. With a motion as harmoniously entrancing as a strain of music, she adjusted the golden fillet on her superbly chiselled Pagan brow, and began her recitation:

She is in love, the Ice-Queen,—charmed and spell-bound; Strings of cold pearls fall from her iced cascades; Flowers in her frozen cisterns weirdly blossom; Flowers in her chilly grottoes flame like gold.