It is easy to explain how the absurd and fatal notion that intellectual application mars women’s peculiar beauty and lessens the feminine graces in general must have arisen. The inference seems to follow logically from the two undeniable premises that pretty girls very often _are_ insipid, and intellectual women commonly _are_ plain. But this is only another case of putting the cart before the horse. Pretty girls, on the one hand, are so rare that they are almost sure to be spoiled by flattery. They receive so much attention that they have no time for study; and ambitious mothers take them into society prematurely, where they get married before their intellectual capacities—which sometimes are excellent—have had time to unfold. Ugly girls, on the other hand, being neglected by the men, have to while away their time with books, music, art, etc., and thus they become bright and entertaining. Therefore it is not the intellect that makes them ugly, but the ugliness that makes them intellectual. The culture that can be compressed into a single lifetime unfortunately does not suffice to modify the bony and cartilaginous parts of the human face sufficiently to change homeliness into beauty; but the muscles can be mobilised, the expression quickened and beautified by an individual’s efforts at culture; hence some of these reputed plain intellectual women, in moments when they are excited, become more truly fascinating, with all their badly-chiselled features, than any number of cold marble faces. If men only knew it!—but they are afraid of them—the average men are—because they do not constantly wish to be reminded of their own mental shortcomings in a tournament of wit, pleasantry, or erudition. Even Schopenhauer, who was convinced that women are too stupid to appreciate a man’s intellect, if abnormal, held that women, on the contrary, gain an advantage in Love by cultivating their minds; adding that it is owing to the appreciation of this fact that mothers teach their daughters music, languages, etc.; thus artificially padding out their minds, as on occasion they do parts of the body. No doubt, as a rule, women are more influenced in love-affairs by a man who excels in athletic qualities of manly energy than by one of intellectual supereminence. But the adoration of women for a Liszt, a Rubinstein, and other men of genius, whose eminence lies in a department that has been made accessible to women for centuries, shows what might be if women were trained in other spheres of human activity and knowledge.