That which I have not been able to accomplish, that which you have not demanded of me, that which nevertheless would have interested you far more than this sleepy talk, is the /Physiology of the Glove/, with this epigraph taken from an anonymous but witty author--"The style is the man; the Glove is the woman; the style sometimes deceives, but the Glove never." I am launched, don't you see, into theories historic, philosophic, and, above all, physiognomic, in a study altogether beside the mark? Allow, my sweet and somnolent one, that if you had permitted me at first to take this part (which for my slight notice was assuredly better), I should have been less clumsily stiff, less dull above all, less pretentious besides; albeit I make no other pretension here than to do your pleasure. You have thrown me the Glove on the confines of history; it is thence that I have raised it with more effeminancy than swagger. I could have wished that fancy might have dictated to history; but, in the present case, it is the most that has been done, if history has succeeded in warming the amiable fancy, which has not taken Gloves to make us villainously sulky with each other. Pardon!--indulgent interlocutress! Excuse also, amiable lady readers, ye who read this congealed babble, and who have yet less reason to be favourable to me, in this sense, that to you all, alas! I cannot say, as was once said in the polite world--/Friendship allows the Glove./ THE MUFF /THE FUR./ The Muff! The very name has something about it delicate, downy, and voluptuous. From that little warm satin nest, where pretty chilly little hands ensconce themselves in silk, carrying with them a lace handkerchief, a box of lozenges, a bouquet of Parma violets, or a tender loving /billet-doux/, a thousand trifles spring up to please us, like a swarm of souvenirs and caressing thoughts of our first years passed at home, and of our first roving loves. In childhood, we delight to play with the large maternal Muff, to pass our hands over it the wrong way to excite the electricity of the long hair, to plunge our faces in the pungent heady odour of its down, and to make use of this furred sack in inconceivable tricks, in playing at hide-and-seek with small objects, or in burying therein the familiar cat, who becomes lazy in its warmth. Then, later on, at the hour of the first rendezvous, during one of those icy winters which Ronsard dreaded for his darling, when we see our so much desired mistress appear veiled and all imprisoned in furs, we become almost jealous of the pretty and coquettish Muff, in which she buries her roguish little nose, which the glacial breeze has lashed and reddened, and we plunge then with a sweet brutality our own hands into the silky cylinder, there to find, and there passionately to press the pretty idle fingers, which we are for so generously thawing, by covering them with long kisses like gloves.