lips and cheeks were tinted; the complexion I never saw excelled for
dazzling fairness,--we see it in a child's face, sometimes. At her side
sat a lady: older, with a quiet, grave face; complexion dark and not
noticeable; hair the brown we see every day; eyes brown and expressive,
but not finer than we often see. Something about it attracted me from her
bewitching neighbor, and I looked and compared. One face was quiet,
listening; the other was sparkling as she talked. The grave dark face
grew upon me; it was not a face, it was a soul, a human life with a
history. The lovely face was lovely still, but I do not care to see it
again; the other I shall not soon forget."

"But it was beauty you saw," persisted Marjorie.

"Not the kind you girls were talking about. A stranger passing through
the room would not have noticed her beside the other. The lovely face has
a history, I was told after supper, and she is a girl of character."

"Still--I wish--story books would not dwell so much on attitudes; and how
the head sets on the shoulders; and the pretty hands and slender figures.
It makes girls think of their hands and their figures. It makes this girl
I know not wrap up carefully for fear of losing her 'slender' figure. And
the eyelashes and the complexion! It makes us dissatisfied with
ourselves."

"The Lord knew what kind of books would be written when he said that man
looketh on the out ward appearance--"

"But don't Christian writers ever do it?"

"Christian writers fall into worldly ways. There are lovely girls and
lovely women in the world; we meet them every day. But if we think of
beauty, and write of it, and exalt it unduly, we are making a use of it
that God does not approve; a use that he does not make of it himself. How
beauty and money are scattered everywhere. God's saints are not the
richest and most beautiful. He does not lavish beauty and money upon
those he loves the best. I called last week on an Irish washerwoman and I
was struck with the beauty of her girls--four of them, the eldest
seventeen, the youngest six. The eldest had black eyes and black curls;
the second soft brown eyes and soft brown curls to match; the third curls
of gold, as pretty as Prue's, and black eyes; the youngest blue eyes and
yellow curls. I never saw such a variety of beauty in one family. The
mother was at the washtub, the oldest daughter was ironing, the second
getting supper of potatoes and indian meal bread, the third beaut