The boy had moments of being drunk in a glorified way even as is the innocent bee, with nothing but wandering among flowers. Owing to a confusion in the ideas attendant on that mysterious soft travailing among the atoms of the heart warmed through by spring, all sorts of things to him were as flowers! His imagination was so increased in power, that with nothing but a pair of little shoes in a show-case to start from he could build up the most astonishing, dreamy stories: he could set feet in the shoes and rear a palatial flesh-and-blood structure over them, as easy as sigh; fit the whole with graces, laces, circumstances and adventures--contrive even to tangle its fate pleasingly with his own. Which may make supposed that he was a youth of some boldness. Far from it. He scarcely knew what a woman's eyes were like, except in profile or fugitive three-quarters; on the other hand, he was well acquainted with her back hair. Hair, in which he could pursue long studies unconfounded, seemed to him the most beautiful thing in all the world. One day, with a view to lengthening the way by taking a road that though shorter must from novelty be richer in diversion than his daily track, he turned into the little street that cut off the triangle of the A. He paused before the window of the worn watches and sleeve-links; he took his time over the faded finery of the second-hand clothes shop; he examined certain yellowed wood-cuts and stained books he found in a narrow open stall. As he seemed coming to the end of the street's resources, he looked over the way and thoughtfully felt his cheek: he could not find there what would have justified a refreshing station at the barber's. He continued his way slowly, to make it last. Now, he stopped where several others were likewise stopping--he had come to Madame Finibald's. The girl sat amid her hair, either unconscious or disdainful of the eyes watching her beyond the glass. She looked in a book open on her lap; now and then she turned over a leaf, sometimes revealing a picture on the page. Her chair was low, perhaps so that her hair should amply trail; its lowness made an excuse for the listlessness of her posture; her feet were outstretched and crossed, the passers might know that one of her shoes was laced with pink twine. If she moved her eyes from her book a moment, it was only to sweep them past the faces, unseeing, and lift them to the strip of sky between the houses--so blue this day, the little bit there was of it. Her face one scarcely noticed for the first moment more than any rosy apple; for oh! her hair!--her hair claimed all the attention a man had to give, did her shining hair falling stately along her cheeks, all over her shoulders, below her waist, beyond her garment--richer, of course, than any possible queen's cloak. The light rippled over it, changing on it all the time, when nothing else in the window appeared to live.