Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/89

 beauty. The young lawyer’s movement necessarily stopped his parents’ progress.

Obliged, by giving her arm to her godfather, to hold her prayer-book in her right hand and her umbrella in the other, Ursule was then displaying the innate grace that graceful women show in performing all the fastidious details belonging to a woman’s charming calling. If thought is revealed as a whole, it must be admitted that this demeanor expressed a divine simplicity. Ursule was dressed in a white muslin gown cut like a dressing-gown trimmed at various points with blue bows. The tippet, edged with ribbon to match run through a wide hem, and tied with bows similar to those on the dress, gave glimpses of the beauty of her bust. The charming tone of her ivory-white neck was set off by all the blue, the disguise of all blondes. Her blue sash with long floating ends outlined a flat, apparently flexible waist, one of the most alluring charms of the sex. She wore a rice-straw hat, simply trimmed with ribbons to match her dress, with the strings tied under the chin, which, whilst it relieved the extreme whiteness of the hat, in no way destroyed that of her beautiful fair complexion. On each side of Ursule’s face, which seemed to lend itself naturally to a headdress à la Berthe, were big smooth plaits of fine fair hair with little tresses which caught the eye with their thousand glistening projections. Her gray eyes, at once gentle and proud, harmonized with a well-shaped forehead. A pink color diffusing her cheeks like a cloud, animated her