There is a pleasant theory--that every woman may be loved, once at least in her life, if she so wills it. It must be true: how, otherwise, can you account for the number of hard-featured visages--lighted up by no redeeming ray of intellect--that preside at "good men's feasts," and confront them at their firesides? How do the husbands manage? Do they, from constantly contemplating an inferior type of creation, lose their comparing and discriminating powers, so that, like the Australian and Pacific aborigines, they come to regard as points of beauty peculiarities that a more advanced civilization shrinks from? Or do their visual organs actually become impaired, like those of captives who can see clearly only in their own dungeon's twilight, and flinch before the full glare of day? If neither of these is the case, they must sometimes sympathize with that dreary dilemma of Bias which the adust Aldrich quotes in grim irony--[Greek: _Ei men kalen, exeis koinen, ei d' aischran, poinen_] (Whether of the two horns impaled the sage of Priene?) Some, of course, are fully alive to the outward defects of their partners; but few are so candid as the old Berkshire squire, who, looking after his spouse as she left the room, said, pensively, "Excellent creature, that! I've liked her better every day for twenty years, but I've always thought she's the plainest-headed woman in England!" Fewer still would wish to emulate the sturdy plain-speaking of the "gudeman" in the Scottish ballad, who, when his witch-wife boasted how she bloomed into beauty after drinking the "wild-flower wine," replied, undauntedly, "Ye lee, ye lee, ye ill womyn, Sae loud I hear ye lee; The ill-faured'st wife i' the kingdom of Fife Is comely compared wi' thee." He could stand all the other marvels of the Sabbat, but _that_ was too much for his credulity. No doubt many of these Ugly Princesses are endowed with excellent sterling qualities. The old Border legend says there never was a happier match than that of "Muckle-mou'ed Meg," though her husband married her reluctantly with a halter tightening round his neck. But such advantages lie below the surface, and take some time in being appreciated. The first process of captivation is what I don't understand--unless, indeed, there are sparkles in the quartz, invisible to common eyes, that tell the experienced gold-seeker of a rich vein near.