Again, care and tact are required to rob sickness of its more painful features, and to render it not too distressing to the home companions. A real woman, with her instincts properly developed--among them the instinct of admiration--knows how to render even invalidism beautiful; and indeed, with her power of improving occasions, she is never more charming than as an invalid or a convalescent. There is a certain refined beauty about her more seductive than the robuster bloom of health. Her whole being seems purified. The coarser elements of humanity are obscured, passions are at rest, and all those fretful, anxious strivings, which probably afflict her when in the full swing of society, are put away as if they had never been. She is forced to let life glide, and her own mind follows the course of the quieter flow. She knows too how to make herself bewitching by the art which is not artifice so much as the highest point to which her natural excellences can be brought. If the radiance of health has gone, she has the sweeter, subtler loveliness of fragility; if her diamonds are laid aside, and all that glory of dress which does so much for women is perforce abandoned, the long, loose folds of falling drapery, with their antique grace, perhaps suit her better, and the fresh flowers on her table may be more suggestive and delightful than artificial ones in her hair. Many a drifting husband has been brought back to his first enthusiasm by the illness of a wife who knew how to turn evil things into good, and to extract a charm even out of suffering. It is a turn of the kaleidoscope; a recombination of the same elements but in a new pattern and with fresh loveliness; whereas the androgynous woman, with her business worries and her honest, if impolitic, self-surrender to hideous flannel wraps and all the uglinesses of a sick room crudely pronounced, would have added a terror to disease which probably would have quenched his waning love for ever. For the androgynous woman despises every approach to coquetry, as she despises all the other insignia of feminine servitude. It is not part of her life's duties to make herself pleasing to men; and they must take her as they find her. Where the true woman contrives a beauty and creates a grace out of her very misfortune, the androgynous holds to the doctrine of spades and the value of the unvarnished truth. Where the one gives a little thought to the most becoming colour of her ribbon or the best arrangement of her draperies, the other pushes the tangled locks off her face anyhow, and makes herself an amorphous bundle of brown and lemon colour. Her sole wish is to get the bad time over. How it would be best got over does not trouble her; and to beautify the inherently unlovely is beyond her skill to compass. Hence her hours of sickness go by in ugliness and idle fretting; while the true woman finds graceful work to do that enlivens their monotony, and in the