r always
the same-sort-of-looking hat." This extreme modesty piqued the
curiosity of her ten million readers enormously. The ten million, of
which I was a member, imagined that she must be too beautiful and too
elegant to possess brains, unless she were a positive miracle. We
pictured her as tall and graceful, with a lovely willowy figure and an
expression all sad tenderness when it wasn't all sweet smiles.

Then one fatal day the famous authoress decided--too late, I'm afraid,
by more than twenty years--to show her face to the ten million
worshippers who demanded so greatly to see it. The irrevocable step
being taken, disillusion jumped to our eyes, as the French say, and
nearly blinded us. Instead of the goddess we had anticipated, all we
saw was, gazing at us out of the pages of an illustrated newspaper, an
over-plump, middle-aged "party" with no figure and a fuzzy fringe, who
stood smiling in an open French window, and herself completely filling
it! The shock to our worship was so intense that it made most of us
think several times before spending 7_s_. on her new love story, were
it ever so romantic. And so that was the net result of _that_!

Wiser far is the other well-known authoress, who apparently had her
last photograph taken somewhere back in the early nineties, and still
sends it forth to the press as her "latest portrait study," which,
perhaps, if she be as wise as she is witty, it will for ever be.

No, I think that authors who insist upon their own photographs
appearing in their own books are either very foolish or puffed out with
pompous pride. Nobody really wants to look at them a second time; or,
even if they do, nine times out of ten those who stay to look remain to
wish they hadn't. I have never yet known an author's face which
compared in charm and interest with the books he writes. Taking
literature as a professional example, it cannot truthfully be said that
beauty often follows brains. In the case of authors, as in so many
other cases, to leave everything to the imagination is by far the
better policy in the long run. But there is this consolation,
anyway--we are what we are, after all, and our faces are very often
libels on our "souls."

Granting this, the theory of the resurrection of the body always leaves
me inordinately cold. As far as I, myself, am concerned, the worms can
have my body--and welcome. May I prove extremely indigestible, that's
all! Preferably, I want to "ce