Though the doors were closed, her day's work had by no means ended. Now she reappeared to stock the shelves with more books after the sales of the previous hours. You may be sure she did not risk ruin to her black dress and red shoes by wearing them as she carried the boxes and the piles of books. Julie was more conveniently dressed in the white blouse and the tight denim breeches of her working-costume. Do you suppose, Maude, that my admiration was blighted by seeing her in such utilitarian garb? Quite the reverse, I assure you! There is nothing like tight denim for revealing such figures as hers. Julie must be eighteen or nineteen years old and yet her legs and thighs are almost as slender as a child's. She has the flat curve of the belly and the backward jut of the hips which would be more common in a nymph of fourteen, scarcely on the threshold of womanhood. Combined with the way she wore her golden blond hair loose upon her shoulder blades this gives the air of a girl-child to her appearance. How could you doubt her charming innocence, my dear Maude? She turned to contemplate the depleted shelves, the jeans-denim tight and smooth over her slim fragile-looking thighs, though drawn into little sheaves of creases behind her knees. Petite and narrow-hipped though she is, there is almost an impudent little fatness to the cheeks of Julie's bottom!

I gazed through the bookshop window, enraptured by such views of her. How I adored the veil of golden blond hair which sweeps from her high crown to her shoulders! What beauty I saw in the slope of her hazel eyes, seeming all the darker for a touch of the mascara brush to their lashes. Julie, too, has a tall sloping forehead and such a sharp, rather crude young nose. Yet if there is an ugliness in any of this, it is of the kind which provokes rather than repels. She is petite, I suppose. Indeed, only her habit of choosing shoes with spiked heels makes one overlook this. With all her imperfections, I adore her.