Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/16

 best feature. There was something agreeable about her figure, too, despite the undeniable fact that she was a trifle stout. Had she been a milk-maid, one might have described her as buxom, and she would have been hard put to appear to advantage in the styles of 1923. The mode of 1897, however, exactly suited her. Her hips and breasts and buttocks were round and pleasing, and she set off smartly her black taffeta dress and her toque of black coquilles, piled with yellow roses, feathers, and ribbons. On the curve of her breast sparkled a life-sized, gold dragon-fly, the wings of which were encrusted with rubies and sapphires, and from the tail of which depended a diamond-studded watch. Her low shoes were of a French design and her black stockings were sheer. Her mutton-legged sleeves, which, bulging at the shoulder, fitted the arm tightly below, terminated in ruffles of ivory lace, fashioned to fall across her hands, but, owing to the excessive heat, she had turned these back, exposing a curious emblem which had been tattooed on her left arm just above the wrist: a skull, pricked in black, on which a blue butterfly perched, while a fluttering phylactery beneath bore the motto: Que sais-je?

Her cigarette—her tenth since she had left Chicago—finished, the Countess discarded the stump and opened the window to permit the smoke to escape so that no evidence should remain of her voluntary turpitude. Then she returned to her green