Her milliner was approved. The duke was a notorious connoisseur
of female charms, and would see, of course, to the decorous adornment of
her person by the best of modistes. Her smiling was pretty, her eyes were
soft; she might turn out good, if well guarded for a time; but these
merits of the woman are not those of the great lady, and her title was
too strong a beam on her character to give it a fair chance with her
critics. They one and all recommended powder for her hair and cheeks.
That odour of the shepherdess could be exorcised by no other means, they
declared. Her blushing was indecent.
Truly the critics of the foeman sex behaved in a way to cause the blushes
to swarm rosy as the troops of young Loves round Cytherea in her
sea-birth, when, some soaring, and sinking some, they flutter like her
loosened zone, and breast the air thick as flower petals on the summer's
breath, weaving her net for the world. Duchess Susan might protest her
inability to keep her blushes down; that the wrong was done by the
insolent eyes, and not by her artless cheeks.
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