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During one of his nocturnal wanderings about the apartment
my father chanced upon
a quiet eventide assembly.
This chance encounter was to be the first of a whole series of gatherings,
in the course of which my father enchanted both of those young ladies
with the charm of his astonishing personality.
In exchange for his chivalrous and witty conversation,
which filled the emptiness of their evenings,
the girls allowed him, the ardent scholar,
to study the structure of their slender and *** bodies.
This all took place during the course of his lecture, with solemnity and refinement
that relieved even the most daring points of those investigations
of the equivocalness of their appearances.
Pulling Paulina’s stocking from her knee,
studying with enrapt eyes the compact and noble construction of its joint,
my father said:
How full of charm, how favourable is
the form of existence you ladies have assumed.
How beautiful and simple is
the thesis entrusted to you ladies, to reveal with your lives.
But with what mastery,
with what finesse do you acquit yourselves of that task!
If I were to cast aside respect before the Creator,
and make a jest in criticism of creation, then I should demand:
Less content, and more form!
Oh, how that loss of content would unburden the world!
More modesty in purposes,
more restraint in claims,
and the world would be more exquisite!
Cried my father as
his hands were laying bare Paulina’s white calf
from the fetters of her stocking.