At such moments she adored Lord Byron for writing such beautiful things about her, and was perfectly happy.
Mrs. Methuen's magazine opened up new possibilities. From its pages she learned that no one need despair of their personal appearance. Had nature been niggardly in the matter of hair, a hundred artists in coiffure advertised their aid. Was one's complexion not quite to one's liking, there were skin specialists galore who undertook to remedy any facial defects. In fact the journal was a regular vade mecum as to the cult of beauty, and such pleasing visions were not conjured up by words alone. There were pictures in plenty of lovely ladies in every stage of lack of attire and with every variety of "transformation." Radiant beings with enormous eyes, preternaturally minute mouths, and figures so slender that one wondered if they ever had anything to eat.
And every one of them had wavy hair.
Now Jane-Anne's hair waved just after it was unplaited, but it was naturally quite straight, soft, fine, abundant hair, growing very prettily round her face with an upward sweep from her forehead.
It was all very well to walk in beauty like the night. It was comparatively easy to imagine one realised Lord Byron's conception of the Hebrew beauty. But here much more was expected.
Jane-Anne was certainly slim, the unkindly accurate might have described her as decidedly thin; but, even so, she was not shaped at all like the ladies depicted in The Peeress. Her legs were long and her hips were small, but—"I seem too thick through," she said to herself.
There was a whole page of replies to anxious students of the Art of Beauty. "Pietista" sought to improve a throat "discoloured and too thin." "Butterfly" complained of "sagging lines beneath chin and around mouth."
Jane-Anne flew to the glass but could discover nothing of the kind, and was comforted.
"Troubled" wanted to know how to "colour dark hair a bright auburn," but Jane-Anne passed this by. She was perfectly satisfied with the colour of her hair. What she did long for was a box of "Magnolia Bloom powder," which The Peeress assured "Amabelle" would lend to the countenance "the soft sheen of a butterfly's wing."
But this desirable appearance could only be arrived at by the expenditure of eighteen-pence, and Jane-Anne possessed but three-halfpence in the world. The other beautifiers cost such vast sums as excluded them altogether from her scheme of possibilities.