The Lord be praised for that much! she said aloud. It was her hair that most pleased her. Black with a suggestion of blue it was like a helmet on her small head. Its tone was faintly echoed in the arm-pits and on the tâche d'encre, as they say in the painter's atelier. A robust girl and a desirable one, though the languorous, voluptuous air was absent. Easter might be profoundly immoral, but never a slimy odalisque. Her temperament was too tonic. Passion--yes, to the edge of tatters. Foaming passion; but no man would ever call her slave. This she resolved, as she squeezed her tiny breasts. Then she bowed low to her image, kicked her right leg on high, turned her comely back, peeped over her shoulder, mockingly stuck out her tongue as she regarded with awe--almost--the width of her delicately modelled buttocks. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed. "I hope I'm not going to get a married woman's bottom like Amy Brown's." Then she slowly dressed, after much pagan joy over her physical beauty. She ate everything they brought her at the luncheon table. "Starved, that's what I am. Nothing since last night." She was glad to be alone at table. She wished to think over the situation. Her money wouldn't last long. What then! Not for a moment did she consider the possibility of a complaisant rich man. She knew her value in that direction; always, or nearly always, having a man messing about you! No, she preferred her liberty, the most precious liberty of sleeping solo, of arising in the morning alone. She swallowed her demi-tasse and found Stone at the door. "Let's walk to Union Square," he said and she assented. They went across to Broadway. He quietly studied his companion, who, in the liveliest spirits, hummed, chattered, flirted with every good-looking man she passed, and elbowed her companion into a state of irritation. He was a stickler for the nuances of behaviour, especially in women. He, the Bohemian, frequenter of race-courses, gambling hells, cafés, cocottes and even worse, couldn't tolerate a slang phrase from the mouth of a woman. He saw that Easter was crude, though not coarse. Her education had been the normal unintelligent education of small towns. She hadn't been taught to talk, walk or dress properly. Nevertheless, she wasn't slouchy, and her bearing distinctive. She was Esther Brandès, and six months hence she would be a full-fledged New York woman. Of that he was assured. Perhaps sooner. And men? She liked them, he saw that. Had she? Who could tell? She wasn't shy. She hadn't thus far blushed. To be sure, the conversation hadn't strayed from the conventional. Then he laughed. She turned to him.