varied natural and artificial influences.
In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow delicate, just as the
hands grow white and soft when saved from toil and incased in soft
gloves. The whole nature becomes subdued into suavity. I confess I like
the quality ladies better than the common kind even of literary ones.
They have n't read the last book, perhaps, but they attend better to you
when you are talking to them. If they are never learned, they make up for
it in tact and elegance. Besides, I think, on the whole, there is less
self-assertion in diamonds than in dogmas. I don't know where you will
find a sweeter portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor play-girl of
King Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when she went before
her lord. I have no doubt she was a more gracious and agreeable person
than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story of Sisera. The
wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something that you know, but an
elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality. The highest
fashion is intensely alive,--not alive necessarily to the truest and best
things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in all its extremities
and to the farthest point of its surface, so that the feather in its
bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a fighting-cock, and the rosette on
its slipper as clean-cut and pimpant (pronounce it English fashion,--it
is a good word) as a dahlia. As a general rule, that society where
flattery is acted is much more agreeable than that where it is spoken.
Don't you see why? Attention and deference don't require you to make
fine speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness (lies) and returning
all the compliments paid you. This is one reason.

--A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,--said the Model.

[My reflection. Oh! oh! no wonder you did n't get married. Served you
right.] My remark. Surely, Madam,--if you mean by flattery telling
people boldly to their faces that they are this or that, which they are
not. But a woman who does not carry about with her wherever she goes a
halo of good feeling and desire to make everybody contented,--an
atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of at least six feet radius, which
wraps every human being upon whom she voluntarily bestows her presence,
and so flatters him with the comfortable thought that she is rather glad
he is alive than otherwise, is