on her.
Physical beauty of every sort was a snare, a Circean enchantment, to
be valiantly contended with and straitly eschewed. Hence they
preached, not moderation, but total abstinence from all pursuit of
physical grace and beauty.

"Now, a resistance founded on an over-statement is constantly tending
to reaction. People always have a tendency to begin thinking for
themselves; and when they so think, they perceive that a good and wise
God would not have framed our bodies with such exquisite care only to
corrupt our souls,--that physical beauty, being created in such
profuse abundance around us, and we being possessed with such a
longing for it, must have its uses, its legitimate sphere of exercise.
Even the poor, shrouded nun, as she walks the convent garden, cannot
help asking herself why, if the crimson velvet of the rose was made by
God, all colors except black and white are sinful for her; and the
modest Quaker, after hanging all her house and dressing all her
children in drab, cannot but marvel at the sudden outstreaking of blue
and yellow and crimson in the tulip-beds under her window, and reflect
how very differently the great All-Father arrays the world's
housekeeping. The consequence of all this has been, that the reforms
based upon these severe and exclusive views have gradually gone
backward. The Quaker dress is imperceptibly and gracefully melting
away into a refined simplicity of modern costume, which in many cases
seems to be the perfection of taste. The obvious reflection, that one
color of the rainbow is quite as much of God as another, has led the
children of gentle dove-colored mothers to appear in shades of
rose-color, blue, and lilac; and wise elders have said, it is not so
much the color or the shape that we object to, as giving too much
time and too much money,--if the heart be right with God and man, the
bonnet ribbon may be of any shade you please."

"But don't you think," said Pheasant, "that a certain fixed dress,
marking the unworldly character of a religious order, is desirable?
Now, I have said before that I am very fond of dress. I have a passion
for beauty and completeness in it; and as long as I am in the world
and obliged to dress as the world does, it constantly haunts me, and
tempts me to give more time, more thought, more money, to these things
than I really think they are worth. But I can conceive of giving up
this thing altogether as being much easier than regulating it to the
p