Never had Madame Bovary been as lovely as she was during this time; hers was that indefinable beauty that comes from joy, enthusiasm, success, and that is nothing more than a harmony of temperament and circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, her experience of pleasure, and her ever-youthful illusions had had the same effect as manure, rain, wind, and sun on a flower, developing her by degrees, and she was at last blooming in the fullness of her nature. Her eyelids seemed shaped expressly for those long, loving glances in which her pupils would disappear, while a heavy sigh would widen her delicate nostrils and lift the fleshy corners of her lips, shadowed, in the light, by a trace of dark down. Some artist skilled in depravity might have arranged the coil of her hair over the nape of her neck; it was looped in a heavy mass, carelessly, according to the chance dictates of her adulterous affair, which loosened it every day. Her voice now took on softer inflections, her body, too; something subtle and penetrating emanated even from the folds of her dress and the arch of her foot. Charles, as in the early days of his marriage, found her delicious and quite irresistible.