Therefore, a great many things must be sacrificed in the shadow and the half-tone, in order to bring out the high lights. Then the eye and the mind are refreshed and rested, as they gaze with pleasure, love, and a sort of poetic contemplation, on such an interior. It is a real picture, a living picture, that we admire as though it were painted on canvas. But it needs a certain elevation of the mind, a certain instinctive ideality, perhaps an exaggerated sense of the beautiful, to cultivate this domestic art, and find in it the constant sources of meditative enjoyment, which are incomprehensible to most people. If I insist upon speaking of this peculiarity, it is because I was much pleased with this similarity in Madame de Pënâfiel's tastes with my own, and it showed her coquetry in such a way that I loved her to adoration. I remember that nothing angered me more than the rudeness of all the men of her acquaintance, who were all perfectly furious on the subject of what they called her intolerable and hateful coquetry. It was, they said, with strange ill-nature, it was a ridiculous pretension on her part, a sort of wager that she had made with herself, to be always gracious and charming. Never was she to be seen unless she was exquisitely dressed; all was prearranged and studied out, from the dim light to the colouring of the curtains, which harmonised with her complexion as though she expected to clothe herself with them. And then, oh, horror! on her writing-table there were natural flowers in a vase, and, could you believe it? they were chosen to match the colour of her hair, as though she meant to wear a head-dress of natural flowers! But that was not all. She had a foot as small as a child's, the finest arms that ever were seen, and an exquisite hand. Well, was it not intolerable? No one could help noticing and admiring her foot, her arm, or her hand, for she was so clever that these charms were always in evidence. It was odious, scandalous, not to be put up with. Now, even if all this were true,--and in a certain way it was true,--could there be anything in the world more absurd or idiotic than to hear a lot of men, dressed in the careless and even untidy way that is permissible nowadays for morning visits, and who went like caterpillars--an old expression that might be revived--to pass an hour at a lady's house, to hear them, I say, complaining bitterly because she had received them surrounded by all that taste, art, and refinement could add to her natural graces? For my part, on the contrary, I took the greatest pleasure in these delightful coquetries of Madame de Pënâfiel, in the contemplation, even though it were simply as a work of art, of such a delicious living picture, which was sometimes so animated, sometimes so sad and languishing.