ite quality which only a few favoured ones can
apprehend--like the beauty of a Whistler or a Corot, and we have been
chosen to be its high-priest and evangelist. It is our secret, this
beautiful face that we love, and we wonder how any one can be found to
love the other faces. We even pity them, those rosy, rounded faces, with
their bright unmysterious eyes and straight noses and dimpled chins. How
fortunate for them that the secret of the beauty we love has been hidden
from their lovers. Sheer Bouguereau! Neither more nor less.

In fact, the beauty we affect is aggressively spiritual, and in so far
as beauty is demonstrably physical we dismiss it with disdain. Our
ideal, indeed, might be said to consist in a beauty which is beautiful
in spite of the body rather than by means of it; a beauty defiantly
clothed, so to say, in the dowdiest of fleshly garments--radiantly
independent of such carnal conditions as features or complexion. Our
ideal of figure might be said to be negative rather than positive, and
that "little sister" mentioned in Solomon's Song would bring us no
disappointment.

We are often heard to say that beauty consists chiefly, if not entirely,
in expression, that it is a transfiguration from within rather than a
gracious condition of the surface, that the shape of a nose is no
matter, and that a beautifully rounded chin or a fine throat has nothing
to do with it--indeed, is rather in the way than otherwise. We point
to the fact--which is true enough--that the most famous beauties
of antiquity were plain women--plain, that is, according to the
conventional standards.

We also maintain--again with perfect truth--that mystery is more than
half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through
the imagination. These and other perfectly true truths about beauty we
discover through our devotion to the one face that we love--and we
should hardly have discovered them had we begun with the merely
cherry-ripe. It is with faces much as it is with books. There is no way
of attaining a vital catholic taste in literature so good as to begin by
mastering some difficult beautiful classic, by devoting ourselves in the
ardent receptive period of youth to one or two masterpieces which will
serve as touchstones for us in all our subsequent reading. Some books
engage all our faculties for their appreciation, and through the keen
attentiveness we are compelled to give them we make personal discovery
of tho