And Beauty—how glibly we utter the word! Indeed, how glibly we utter all those words, the meaning of which is so difficult clearly to define! “Democracy,” “Liberty,” “Freedom,” “Friendship,” “Love”—and, let it be owned, the “Hereafter”!—how often we use the words as a kind of final argument, and how often, so mesmerized has become our Intelligence by these words, do we accept them without question as something appertaining to finality. It is the same with Beauty. To call a woman “beautiful” requires no corollary. That is all that need be said! Merely to say it, especially if the word is spoken by some one in High Authority, is sometimes sufficient to create a reputation for loveliness—as women who have been the mistresses of kings know full well. The world asks so little more of a beautiful woman than her beauty. Which perhaps accounts—though in a book of Beautiful Women let it be printed in small type—for so many lovely women being intellectually dull! But then, if one is good to look upon, one can afford to be dreary company. Loveliness is its own forgiveness of intellectual sins. It is a “decoration,” and we do not ask of decorations to be more than perfect in regard to colouring and symmetry of line. Success is, after all, but a reflection of ourselves in the world, and Beauty finds its reflection in almost every human eye and in almost every human heart. Its way through life is indeed strewn with roses—those lovely flowers which hide such very vindictive thorns. God makes beautiful women; a Plain Woman has to do the best she can for herself. Her only hope lies in the fact that what fascinates Tom may leave Dick indifferent—and who knows but that Harry will find that she herself is more attractive than any other woman? Which brings me back to a definition of Beauty, and that, being at heart a sluggard, I had purposely wished to avoid. “Beauty” is to me but another name for “Harmony.” It is harmonious to some ideal indigenous to the “soul.” It may only be “skin deep,” as the Plain Woman likes to assert for the benefit of vain schoolgirls, but the beholding eye nevertheless endows it with “spirituality.” It likes to believe this loveliness is only an outer symbol of an inner spiritual grace. Which fact will account in some way for different types of beautiful women appealing to different types of men—so that even an ugly woman sometimes hears herself addressed in the language Mars probably used to Venus.