at she is the kind of girl he
fancies she is? I think it is; but some of the greatest little frauds
I know are the purry, kitteny girls with big, innocent blue eyes.

Blazing black eyes, and the rich, warm colors which dark-skinned women
have to wear, suggest energy and brilliance and no end of intellect.
Men look into such eyes and seem not to be able to see below the
surface. They have not the pleasure of a long, deep gaze into
immeasurable depths. And so they think her designing and clever, and
(God save the mark!) even intellectual, when perhaps she has a wealth
of love and devotion and heroism stored up behind that impulsive
disposition and those dazzling black eyes which would do and dare more
in a minute for some man she had set that great heart of hers upon
than your cool-blooded, tranquil blonde would do in forty years. A
mere question of pigment in the eye has settled many a man's fate in
life, and established him with a wife who turned out to be very
different from the girl he fondly thought he was getting.

Yet whenever I complain to experienced married women of how
discouraging it is to wear your good clothes for unappreciative men,
they beg me not to be guilty of the heresy of wishing things
different. If they have married one of the noticing kind, they tell me
harrowing tales of gorgeous costumes having been cast aside because
these critical men made fun of, or were prejudiced against them, and
"made remarks." And they point with envy to Mrs. So-and-So, whose
husband never knows what she has on, but who thinks she looks lovely
in everything, so that she is at liberty to dress as she pleases. When
a woman defers to her husband's taste, she sometimes is the
best-dressed woman in the room. And sometimes another woman, dressing
according to another man's taste, is the worst-dressed. So you see you
never can tell. "De mule don't kick 'cordin' to no rule."

There is something rather pathetic to me about a man being so ignorant
of why a woman's dress is beautiful, but only the effect remaining in
his memory. He remembers how she looked on a certain day in a certain
gown. He thinks he remembers her dress. He thinks he would know it
again if he saw it. But the truth is that he is remembering the woman
herself, her face, her voice, her eyes--above all, what she said, and
how she said it. If she wore a scarlet ribbon in her dark hair, a red
rose in another woman's hair will most unaccountably bring it all back
to