Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 January 1886 — KNOW WHEN THEY ARE PRETTY. [ARTICLE]

KNOW WHEN THEY ARE PRETTY.

Women Who are Beautiful Cannot Be Ignorant of the Pact. There are men of experience who will confidently assert that a woman is lovely of face though they catch but a glimpse of the figure from behind, and they will be right nine times out of ten. Such are guided not by the eye alone but by symmetry of shape and grace of movement. Ugly women have these qualifications, though as a rule, it would be found that their ngliness belongs to that class which logicians would call “accidental.” Wilkie Collins tells how one of his heroes conceived the most glowing fancies of some young girl’s face upon observation of her back; she turned, and proved to he a mulatto. This was what we should call an “accident. ” The beauty nature designed was marred by the luckless chance that her skin and features appealed only to negro taste. So it is with women under a variety of circumstances, infinite as the risks and combinations of human life. The experienced person is not deceived by inconsistencies of this kind. He brings knowledge of the world and mankind to bear. A woman who is beautiful cannot be ignorant of the fact—unless she be stupid; we read of such things with pleasure, as we read of other agreeable prodigies in romance. But when a girl child percieves that she is welcome everywhere, that olcL people smile at her approach, and young men pay her more attention than her comrades get, she must be duller than are the majority of her sex if the suspicion that she is good looking does not strike her. In a few months suspicion becomes a delicious certainty. Whispers are overheard* glances caught; the mirror anxiously consulted gives pleasing assurance. Even if there be no servant, no complacent mother, nor goodnatured friend of the family to set her doubts at rest, the warmth and the frankness of boy lovers atS proof enough. We do not believe that there ever was a girl living in the realms of thd inhabitable globe who did not know her prettiness, if pretty she was, before reaching the age of seventeen; hut it is sadly true that many girls who are not pretty fail into error on the point.—Ear.