Not only do beauty and stupidity often go hand in hand, but beauty and commonplace affections often do this. Butterflies love the flavour of cabbage, and some beautiful girls—by their own confession—“love” onions. It is no crime to like onions, but to “love” them is to waste sweetness.
PARIS UP TO DATE
That vanity, as a whole, is less often met with in beautiful girls than in unbeautiful ones is a well-known fact, and it is a fact which I am so little inclined to challenge that I give the following cases as being to my full belief exceptions to the rule.
A beautiful girl, known to me, while really very young poses as being very much younger. Her age is seventeen or thereabouts, and she poses as being fourteen. If her age were forty or thereabouts, and she posed as being seventeen, one would more easily forgive her. She will derive the benefit of this mental bias some twenty years hence.
The fashion-plate girl
In the case of another beautiful girl known to me, so much of her is dress that her appearance seems to warrant what once seemed to me an unwarrantable piece of English, being the following extract from a society paper of the year 1887—
“Among the younger ladies was a pretty white tulle with marguerites and a white satin bodice.”
At first reading of that I asked myself, “What sort of a young lady is a pretty white tulle with marguerites and a white satin bodice?”