She was young, pretty, slender, of an almost unbelievable whiteness, pure alabaster; her cheeks were colourless, her black eyes were more remarkable for their liveliness and luminosity than for their size; her eyebrows were incredible, as if drawn in an arch with the tip of a very fine brush; her mouth was small and red, with rather thick, plump lips, bursting with blood, as if they contained all the blood that was missing in her face; her teeth were small, like bits of curdled glass; her hair was brown and not very copious, shining like silk twists and gathered in a graceful tangle on the crown of her head. But the most characteristic thing about this singular creature was that she looked like a pure ermine, and her spirit of neatness, for she was not stained even when lowering herself to the coarsest domestic tasks. Her hands, perfectly shaped—what hands!—had a mysterious virtue, like her body and clothes, of being able to say to the lower strata of the physical world: la vostra miseria non mi tange. She bore in her entire person the impression of an intrinsic, elemental, superior cleanliness, prior to any contact with anything unclean or impure. As a rag doll, fox in hand, dust and rubbish respected her; and when she dressed up and put on her purple dressing gown with white rosettes, her bun, pierced with golden hairpins, was a faithful image of a high-ranking Japanese lady. But what else, if she seemed to be made of paper, of that plastic, warm and living paper in which those inspired Orientals represent the divine and the human, the comic tending to serious, and the serious that makes one laugh? Her matte white face was of clear paper, her dress of paper, her very fine, shapely, incomparable hands of paper.