A Woman of the World Part 23

There is much you can do to make yourself more attractive personally.

You know what Rochefoucauld said: "No woman is in fault for not being beautiful at sixteen; any woman is in fault if she is not beautiful at forty."

However much it may sound like a plat.i.tude, it is a great and eternal truth that your mental activities are chiselling your features. By keeping yourself concerned with good, gracious, and great thoughts, you are shaping your face into a n.o.ble beauty minute by minute, and hour by hour.

Avoid as much as possible looking at repulsive and ugly objects.

Look at whatever is beautiful and seek for it.

Search for whatever is admirable in nature and human nature, and muse upon those things in your moments of solitude.

Cultivate love-thoughts for humanity at large.

Avoid severe criticisms, and develop sympathy and pity in your soul.

Study the comfort and pleasure of strangers in public places, and friends and a.s.sociates in nearer relations.

Remember always how brief a thing, and ofttimes sad, life is to many, and seek to brighten and better it as you pa.s.s along.

Meanwhile, take care of your person, study your lines and your features, and learn how to dress and how to carry yourself; how to obtain "presence," that indescribable charm in woman.

Take daily care of your complexion, which to a woman is of prime importance.

Call in the skill of the specialist to help you preserve and beautify your skin and hair, just as the dentist and the oculist are to be consulted to help you preserve teeth and eyes. Think beauty for mind, soul, and body; live it, and believe it is your right.

And just as surely as you pursue this line of conduct for ten years, just so surely will you find yourself at thirty far more attractive than at twenty, and at forty more lovely than at thirty. Learn to be a linguist, and acquire skill upon some one instrument, that you may entertain those who care to converse, and give pleasure to those who wish to be silent.

You are young, and life with its splendid possibilities is before you.

There is nothing a woman with youth, will-power, and _love_ may not accomplish--even to the convincing of the world that she is beautiful, when her mirror may say otherwise.

For enduring and all-encompa.s.sing beauty is a composite thing, and unless a woman possesses the spiritual and mental portions, the physical phase soon loses its attractions for the cultivated eye; while with the development of the first two, the third is certain to come.

Begin to-day, my dear girl, to _grow beauty_ which shall make you a power and an influence in the world where you move, and which shall invite, rather than fear, the approach of time.

To Mrs. White Peak

_One of the Pillars of Respectable Society_

Ever since your call and our conversation regarding Sybyl Marchmont, I have felt a rising tide of indignation. It has reached the perigee mark and must overflow. If it reaches you and gives you a thorough soaking, I shall feel satisfied.

I have always known you were only half-developed. There are many such people in the world. They serve their purpose and often do much good.

They miss a great deal of life, but as they rarely know that they miss anything, it is a waste of sentiment to pity them.

I have pitied you, nevertheless. I have often wished I could give you the vital qualities you lack.

My pity turned to indignation when I heard you express yourself in such unqualified terms of condemnation regarding other women who happened to be unlike you in temperament.

You say there is a certain line which no well-born and womanly woman can pa.s.s in thought or feeling or action.

You regard the true women of earth as a higher and rarer order of creation than the best of men, and any woman who by action or word confesses herself to be quite human in her temperament, you feel is, to a certain extent, "unclean and uns.e.xed." You believe the really good women of earth are always on a plane above and beyond the physical. When any woman falls from her pedestal you despise her.

How dare you, madam, sitting in your cold, white chast.i.ty, lay down laws of what you consider purity, morality, and cleanliness, for other human souls?

How dare you condemn those who do not reach your standard?

What do you know of life, great, palpitating, throbbing, vital life, terrible and beautiful life, terrible while pa.s.sing through the valleys of temptation, beautiful upon the heights of self-control?

How dare you a.s.sume greater virtue, greater respectability, greater fineness of sentiment, than the tempest-tossed, pa.s.sion-beaten souls, about you?

What do you know of real virtue, real strength?

You have been poor, you tell me, in worldly riches, and you have been lonely, yet you have never once degraded your womanhood by an "unworthy " impulse. Never known a temptation of the senses. Those things disgusted you.

You have preferred toil to taking favours from inferiors, and you have kept yourself clean in thought, word, and deed, and now you have the reward of such virtues--a good home, a husband, and children.

You are a more devoted mother than wife, as you have always dwelt upon a lofty white peak of chaste womanhood, from which any descent into the earthly realms of life and love was repugnant--so rarely "pure" and high your nature.

Yet you have been a dutiful, loyal wife, and you are a devoted mother.

You despise all carnal-minded women, and cannot understand how women fall--save that they lack good birth and breeding.

You will aid in a benefit for their reformation, but you do not want to see them or to come near them. It makes you ill.

You are to be congratulated on never having added to the evil in the world.

But permit me, madam, to tell you some truths about yourself--and the large army of "respectable women" you represent.

However "well born" you may be, you are only half-born. The complete human being has three sides to his nature--spiritual, mental, physical.

The men and women who are evenly developed on the three sides are few.

This is sometimes their fault--sometimes their misfortune.

We all pity the human being who is mentally dwarfed. We are sorry for the one whose spiritual nature is undeveloped.

But why should the many women who are devoid of the physical qualities of human nature presume to lay claim to perfection and to regard the normal woman as a suspicious character?

You have a fine, active mind, a highly spiritual nature, but you are stunted in strong, physical emotion. You are incapable of it, and pride yourself upon the fact.

If that pleases you, well and good.

But how dare you criticize G.o.d's _complete human_ beings, who feel the great vibrations of the universe, who glow and thrill with that divine creative force, who live a thousand lives and die a thousand deaths before they learn the glory of self-conquest.

How dare you shrink even from those who fall by the wayside, and call your shrinking "purity"!

Let me ask you another question:

How dare you turn away from that girl who went through the door of the Magdalene Home you helped establish, with her fatherless child in her arms?