The maiden did not make a great impression on Petronius at the first glance; she seemed to him too slender.

But from the moment when he saw her more nearly in the triclinium he thought to himself that Aurora might look like her; and as a judge he understood that in her there was something uncommon.

He considered everything and estimated everything; hence her face, rosy and clear, her fresh lips, as if set for a kiss, her eyes blue as the azure of the sea, the alabaster whiteness of her forehead, the wealth of her dark hair, with the reflection of amber or Corinthian bronze gleaming in its folds, her slender neck, the divine slope of her shoulders, the whole posture, flexible, slender, young with the youth of May and of freshly opened flowers.

The artist was roused in him, and the worshipper of beauty, who felt that beneath a statue of that maiden one might write "Spring." All at once he remembered Chrysothemis, and pure laughter seized him.

Chrysothemis seemed to him, with golden powder on her hair and darkened brows, to be fabulously faded,--something in the nature of a yellowed rose-tree shedding its leaves.