_He:_ “‘Silly’ yourself!” Not only do beauty and stupidity often go hand in hand, but beauty and commonplace affections often do this. Butterflies love the flavour of cabbage, and some beautiful girls—by their own confession—“love” onions. It is no crime to like onions, but to “love” them is to waste sweetness. [Illustration: PARIS UP TO DATE] That vanity, as a whole, is less often met with in beautiful girls than in unbeautiful ones is a well-known fact, and it is a fact which I am so little inclined to challenge that I give the following cases as being to my full belief exceptions to the rule. A beautiful girl, known to me, while really very young poses as being very much younger. Her age is seventeen or thereabouts, and she poses as being fourteen. If her age were forty or thereabouts, and she posed as being seventeen, one would more easily forgive her. She will derive the benefit of this mental bias some twenty years hence. [Illustration: The fashion-plate girl] In the case of another beautiful girl known to me, so much of her is dress that her appearance seems to warrant what once seemed to me an unwarrantable piece of English, being the following extract from a society paper of the year 1887— “Among the younger ladies was a pretty white tulle with marguerites and a white satin bodice.” At first reading of that I asked myself, “What sort of a young lady is a pretty white tulle with marguerites and a white satin bodice?” I do not ask myself that question now. [Illustration: HEART VERY HARD AND IN THE WRONG PLACE] Thirdly, a beautiful girl of my acquaintance has a face with what her enemy calls “Inspection invited” all over it. That is unbeautiful phrasing, but the charge thus levelled is not without foundation in fact. One hopes that some day there may happen to this girl what there happened once to a beautiful girl. She looked in the glass to see her face, and she saw her heart, and that day all vanity left her. As a picture of a beautiful girl I give in conclusion the following:— _The Girl with the Face, described by one who knew her._ She used to pass my windows. She had a face of quite perfect loveliness, the mouth and eyes very merry, and flashing brown hair that hung open to her waist. She was slightly deformed, her figure being thrown on one side, like the leaf of a begonia. I never liked the leaf of a begonia until I came to see her. In all I may have seen her a hundred times, then she ceased passing my windows, and after a while they brought me news that she was dead. By special favour, they let me see her lying in her coffin, and this is how she looked:—Her mouth, that had always been very merry, was quite grave, and her hands were folded on her breast. They had put a rose in one of them, and it laid its soft round cheek against her breast. Some of them—this vexes me still as I write it—had tried to lay her hair about her so as to hide that slight deformity that made her lie like a begonia leaf.