As one gazed on her—had there been any there to gaze—it was impossible not to perceive that, within that fair form and under those impassive features, there was—what with Oriental women is not at all times the case—a sentient and intellectual soul, and that soul at this time engrossed in some deep and powerful strain of meditative thought. And oh! how beautiful she was. The perfect oval of her regular face, the straight, Grecian outline of her chisseled features, the dark clearness of her pure, transparent complexion, through which, though ordinarily colorless, every transient motion of the blood mantled in crimson, the slender, yet exquisitely rounded figure, the soft curves of her plump and shapely arms, were all as nearly perfect as mortality can approach to perfection. The dress, moreover, which she wore—as far removed as possible, by the way, from the ungraceful and hideous monstrosity which a set of crazy notoriety-mongers have been striving to introduce among us as the costume of Oriental ladies—set off her foreign-looking charms by its own foreign eccentricity, no less than by the barbaric splendor of its materials. A low, flat Fezzan cap of rich crimson velvet, superbly embroidered in gold and pearls, was set lightly, a little on one side, upon her luxuriant black tresses, and from it depended a long tassel, exquisitely wrought of grains of native gold and seed-pearls, down to her left shoulder, contrasting in strong relief the glossy darkness of the hair, by the brilliancy of its white and gold. Immense pendants of pearl hung from the roseate tips of each small ear, and a string of the same inestimable gems, not one of them inferior in size to a large currant, formed four distinct necklaces upon her chest, beside a fifth and longer coil, which hung down almost to her waist. A _jellick_, as it was called, or, as we should term it now, a chemisette of the finest Indian muslin, wrought as its name indicates at Mosul on the Tigris, embroidered with threads of gold, alone covered her glowing bosom; but above it she wore an open, sleeveless Dymar of gorgeous green brocade, with hanging filigree buttons of gold; and shrouding all her lower limbs, to the very tips of the small, slippered feet, as she lay half-crouched on her divan, an under robe or tunic of blush-colored Persian silk with broad, perpendicular stripes of dead gold, the sleeves of which, close to the elbow, fell thence downward, open like those of the modern gown worn by bachelors of arts. No appearance of trowsers, no marked cutting line, nothing tight or definite or rigid, nothing harsh, stiff or masculine was to be discovered on the nearest scrutiny. A superb Cashmere shawl was wound about her waist at the junction of the under robe and chemisette, and its loose ends blended admirably with the floating draperies and harmonized with the wavy ease which was the principal characteristic of the dress, the attitude, the pose, the woman.