Besides being comely, the Irish women have the advantage of what one may term an individual beauty. In England you might rake together twenty beautiful blondes and twenty pretty brunettes, and discover that they were merely blondes and brunettes and nothing more. That is to say the blondes might readily pass for sisters, and so might the brunettes, both sorts lacking the ultimate gift of individuality. Irish women are different—indeed, you may safely say of them that they are all pretty and all different. They never repeat their beauty, there is nothing of the white rabbit or puss, puss, puss about them, and consequently they do not bore you. As most things have a cause it seems possible that there are reasons for the beauty of Irish womanhood. For myself I should be disposed to ascribe it to the circumstance that the average Irish woman, be she rich or poor, leads the life which a woman was intended to lead by the order of things, namely, the domestic life. Irish women are not without the wit to know that they are beautiful; they have an armory of feminine allurements, and wit enough to handle them with skill, and they cannot be considered insensible to the fripperies which all women love. But they do not make gaiety and ostentation the aim and end of their existence, and they do not shirk the plain duties of womanhood. In Ireland, though the women of the poorer classes have to work in the fields and undertake tasks which by good rights should be done by men, there is absolutely no third sex. The manly woman, the emancipated woman, and the impertinent flat-chested typewriter banger, which so infest Great Britain, are unknown. Even the Irish sportswoman—and, as everybody knows, she is pretty numerous—retains her womanliness in a way that is quite beyond the horsey or doggy woman of the Shires. So that in one respect at least Ireland may be reckoned something of a paradise. CHAPTER XI THE LONDON IRISH