marriage. In repose, she
was superb; in motion, quite perfectly beautiful of form and carriage,
with all the suave rhythms of a beautiful being.

Her beauty was her sole opulence; the boast of her friends; the
confession of her enemies; the magnet of many lovers; the village's one
statue. She had an ordinary heart, quite commonplace brains, but beauty
that lined the pathway where she walked with eyes of admiration and
delight.

In her town, among her suitors, was one that was a Fool--not a
remarkable fool; a simple, commonplace fool of the sort that abounds
even in villages. He was foolish enough to love the Beauty so completely
that when he made sure that she would not love him he could not endure
to remain in the village, but went far away in the West to get the
torment of her beauty out of his sight. The other suitors, who were
wiser than he, when they found that she was not for them, gave her up
with mild regret as one gives up a fabulous dream, saying: "There was
no hope for us, anyway. If the Fool had stayed at home he would have
been saved from the sight of her, for she is going East, where there are
great fortunes for the very beautiful."

And this she made ready to do, since the praise she had received had
bred ambition in her--a reasonable and right ambition, for why should a
light be hidden under a bushel when it might be set up on high to
illumine a wide garden? Besides, she had not learned to love any of the
unimportant men who loved her important beauty, yet promised it nothing
more than a bushel to hide itself in.

So she made ready to take her beauty to the larger market-place. But the
night before she was to leave the village her father's house took fire
mysteriously. The servant, rushing to her door to waken her, died,
suffocated there before she could cry out. The Beauty woke to find her
bed in flames. She rose with hair and gown ablaze, and, agonizing to a
window, leaped blindly out upon the pavement. There the neighbors
quenched the fire and saved her life--but nothing more.

Thereafter she was a cripple, and her vaunted beauty was dead; it had
gone into the flames, and she had only the ashes of it on her seared
face. Now she had only pity where she had had envy and adulation. Now
there was a turning away of eyes when she hurried abroad on necessary
errands. Now her enemies were tenderly disposed toward her, and
everybody forbore to mention what she had been. Everybody spared her
feelings and