I do not care for posturing women. But she struck me. I had to stop and look at her. The legs were well apart, the right foot boldly advanced, the left trailing with studied casualness. She held her right hand before her, al most touching the window, the fingers thrusting up like a beautiful flower. The left hand she held a little behind her and seemed to push down playful lapdogs. Head well back, a faint smile, eyes half-closed with boredom or pleasure. I could not tell. Very artificial the whole thing, but then I am not a simple man. She was a beautiful woman. I saw her most days, sometimes two or three times. And of course she struck other postures as the mood took her. Sometimes as I hurried by (I am a man in a hurry) I allowed my self a quick glance and she seemed to beckon me, to welcome me out of the cold. Other days I remember seeing her in that tired, dejected passivity which fools mistake for femininity. I began to take notice of the clothes she wore. She was a fashionable wo man, naturally. In a sense it was her job. But she had none of the sexless, mincing stiffness of those barely animated clothes-hangers who display haute couture in stuffy salons to the sound of execrable muzak. No, she was another class of being. She did not exist merely to present a style, a current mode. She was above that, she was beyond that. Her clothes were pe ripheral to her beauty. She would have looked good dressed in old paper bags. She disdained her clothes, she discarded them every day for others. Her beauty shone through those clothes . . . and yet they were beautiful clothes. It was autumn. She wore capes of deep russet browns, or twirling peasant skirts of orange and green, or harsh trouser suits of burnt ochre. It was spring. She wore skirts of passion-fruit gingham, white calico shirts or lavish dresses of cerulean green and blue. Yes, I noticed her clothes, for she under stood, as only the great portrait painters of the eighteenth century under stood, the sumptuous possibilities of fabric, the subtleties of folds, the nu ance of crease and hem. Her body in its rippling changes of posture, adapt ed itself to the unique demands of each creation; with breathless grace the lines of her perfect body played tender counterpoint with the shifting ara besques of sartorial artifice. But I digress. I bore you with lyricism. The days came and passed. I saw her this day and not that, and perhaps twice on another day. Imperceptibly seeing her and not seeing her became a factor in my life, and then before I 71