I have spoken only of her moral charm: it requires time for the unaccustomed foreign eye to discern the physical charm. Beauty, according to our Western standards, can scarcely be said to exist in this race,--or, shall we say that it has never yet been developed? One seeks in vain for a facial angle satisfying Western aesthetic canons. It is seldom that one meets even with a fine example of that physical elegance,--that manifestation of the economy of force,--which we call grace, in the Greek meaning of the word. Yet there is charm--great charm--both of face and form: the charm of childhood--childhood with its every feature yet softly and vaguely outlined (efface, as a French artist would call it),--childhood before the limbs have fully lengthened,--slight and, dainty, with admirable little hands and feet. The eyes at first surprise us, by the strangeness of their lids, so unlike Aryan eyelids, and folding upon another plan. Yet they are often very charming; and a Western artist would not fail to appreciate the graceful terms, invented by Japanese or Chinese art, to designate particular beauties in the lines of the eyelids. Even if she cannot be called handsome, according to Western [364] standards, the Japanese woman must be confessed pretty,--pretty like a comely child; and if she be seldom graceful in the Occidental sense, she is at least in all her ways incomparably graceful: her every motion, gesture, or expression being, in its own Oriental manner, a perfect thing,--an act performed, or a look conferred, in the most easy, the most graceful, the most modest way possible. By ancient custom, she is not permitted to display her grace in the street: she must walk in a particular shrinking manner, turning her feet inward as she patters along upon her wooden sandals. But to watch her at home, where she is free to be comely,--merely to see her performing any household duty, or waiting upon guests, or arranging flowers, or playing with her children,--is an education in Far Eastern aesthetics for whoever has the head and the heart to learn.... But is she not, then, one may ask, an artificial product,--a forced growth of Oriental civilization? I would answer both "Yes" and "No." She is an artificial product in only the same evolutional sense that all character is an artificial product; and it required tens of centuries to mould her. She is not, on the other hand, an artificial type, because she has been particularly trained to be her true self at all times when circumstances allow,--or, in other words, to be delightfully natural. The old-fashioned education of her sex was directed to the development [365] of every quality essentially feminine, and to the suppression of the opposite quality. Kindliness, docility, sympathy, tenderness, daintiness--these and other attributes were cultivated into incomparable blossoming. "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever: do noble things, not dream them, all day long"--those