Fort Worth daily gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, 1890-12-07

with en- intellect that keeps his own on
the alert is burdensOme, not only make
the mistake of assuming that he Is .
man of sense, but are advising US TO
Rise a race of fools-unless they mean
that mothers should SO utterly count for
nothing that they cannot even deterio-
rate the race. But must women remain
ounces that men NAV be pleased? Alas Y
men must take women as they find theMs,
and they find them escaped from taef
Oriental bondage which allowed thew,
since they had no souls, to cultivate only
the body and acknowledge no other lord
than the lord of the harem.
To the plain woman who is a wife her
wait of beauty is almost ALWAYS grief.
She fancies she might have won a moro
perfect allegiance if she had worn the
red and white of some more fortunate
woman; che pities her husband among
other men, as Sir Gawain 3 wife may
have done, that his wife is uncomely;
she longs to fill his eyes with pleasure;
she would be burned alive il she might
rise from her ashes fair enough to take
the reproach of her uncomliness away
from him-fair enough to see his gaze
follow her with rapture. She does not
realize that it is herself that he loves,
aud not an evanescent bloom or sparkle;
that If she has not beauty he does not
miss it; that his eyes follow her now
with rapture of another and better sort;
that fair or foul he lover her, and il her
eyes were crossed he would not have
them Strengthened and SO change her to
one fairer.
Yet no woman need be ugly. II there
is soul in her body, it has but to begin
betimes to show through. From her
earliest girlhood the thoughts she thinks,
the feelings to which she gives way, the
tones she utters, the wishes she INDUCES,
are sculpturing lines in her face that are
capable of making beauty all their own
lines whose writing will remain when
bloom fades and sparkle falls.
1t Is in the beginning of manhood and
in the beginning of old age tina; man is
captivated simply by a pretty face, en-
dows its owner with all imaginary graces
of the spirit, and is in breathless haste to
make her charms his own possession.
The maturer man is far less subject to
a mistaken infatuation. The boy looks
for beauty, the glowing cheek, the melt
ing eye, the lovely lip; he cannot endure
the notion, he will say, of an unlovely
countenance in perpetual evidence. The
old Lothario returns to his childhood in
this regard.
But if the youth waits a few years
wisdom has found him out, and the wife
he chooses is chosen for wear. Not that
such an element enters into his plans at
all-he should despise himself if it did;
he, too, is either taken by storm or
drifts gently into the current that, at
first O mere wave at his feet, is preseut thy
the all-emb racing tide; but he has be-
come the one not to be taken by storm
by trifing forces, the one not to be
swept away by shallow waters. the one
to whom prettiness alone has very insult
ttcient attraction. It Is not that he has
seen the havoc wrought by this mere
prettiness in the families of his unwise
friends, in the households of those Mat
thews who ate the green apples which /.
as some one has said, never did agree
with the human race either in the time
of Eden or afterward. l. is not that he
has seen the pretty face lose all its fresh
ness with the first Illness or with
few years wear, while
sickIy, slovenly shape trailed round
a house that was ordered into dis
order; not that he has seen the face still
a. pretty, still as empty. untitled by
life's experience with anything more
than first youth brought; it is not that
he has seen his friend, onos OF som .