Helen Darley could not, in the nature of things, have possessed the
kind of beauty which pleases the common taste. Her eye was calm,
sad-looking, her features very still, except when her pleasant smile
changed them for a moment, all her outlines were delicate, her voice
was very gentle, but somewhat subdued by years of thoughtful labor, and
on her smooth forehead one little hinted line whispered already that
Care was beginning to mark the trace which Time sooner or later would
make a furrow. She could not be a beauty; if she had been, it would
have been much harder for many persons to be interested in her. For,
although in the abstract we all love beauty, and although, if we were
sent naked souls into some ultramundane warehouse of soul-less bodies
and told to select one to our liking, we should each choose a handsome
one, and never think of the consequences,--it is quite certain that
beauty carries an atmosphere of repulsion as well as of attraction with
it, alike in both sexes. We may be well assured that there are many
persons who no more think of specializing their love of the other sex
upon one endowed with signal beauty, than they think of wanting great
diamonds or thousand-dollar horses. No man or woman can appropriate
beauty without paying for it,--in endowments, in fortune, in position,
in self-surrender, or other valuable stock; and there are a great many
who are too poor, too ordinary, too humble, too busy, too proud, to pay
any of these prices for it.
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