“You are such a handsome man you don’t need to understand people. The object of understanding people is to get the better of them; but when one is handsome, people open their doors at once.”
“Then why don’t you open yours?”
“If I don’t, it is as much on your account as on mine.”
“How is that?”
“When I tell you that, I shall have told you a great deal. But why didn’t you protest that you had no notion you were handsome, and that I was a flatterer?”
“I know I’m handsome, and I’m glad of it.”
“Do you often speak the truth like that?”
“You get more truth out of me than I suspected of being in me. But if, some day, you provoke me to some truth that I had better have kept to myself, it will be your fault.”
“I don’t think there is much danger. I like this first truth of yours. If I were handsome I should be glad of it, too. Ugly women are suspicious, designing and jealous. They talk about the charms of a cultivated intelligence being superior, in the long run, to beauty. But beauty does not wait for the long run—it wins at once, and lets the cultivated intelligence run on to Jericho, if it likes. I imagine most cultivated intelligences would be thankful to be fools, if they could afford it.”
“But beauty doesn’t always imply folly.”