deeply-read theologian, if she cannot keep the accounts square, knows nothing of the management of children, lets herself be cheated by the servants and the tradespeople, has not her eyes opened to dirt and disorder, and gives way to a fretful temper on the smallest provocation?
The pretty fool who spends half her time in trying on new dresses and studying the effect of colours, and who knows nothing beyond the last new novel and the latest plate of fashions, is not a more disastrous wife than the woman of profound learning whose education has taught her nothing practical. They stand at the opposite ends of the same scale, and neither end gives the true position of women. Indeed, if one must have a fool in one's house, the pretty one would be the best, as, at the least, pleasant to look at; which is something gained.
The intellectual fool, with her head always in books and 'questions,' and her children dropping off like sheep for the want of womanly care, is something more than flesh and blood can tolerate. The pretty fool cannot help herself. If nature proved herself but a stepmother to her, and left out the best part of her wits while taking such especial care of her face, it is no fault of hers; but the intellectual fool is a case of maladministration of powers, for which she alone is responsible; and in this particular alternative between beauty and brains, without a shadow of doubt we would go in for beauty.
Ball-rooms and dinner-tables are the two places where certain women most shine. In the ball-room Hebe is the queen, and has it all her own way without fear of rivals. A very few men who care for dancing for its own sake will certainly dance with Hecate if she is light on hand, keeps accurate time, and manages her feet with scientific precision; but to the ruck of youths, Hebe, who jerks herself into step every second round, but whose lovely face and perfect figure make up for everything, is the partner they all besiege. Only to those exceptional few who regard dancing as a serious art would she be a bore with her three jumps and a hop; while Hecate, waltzing like an angel, would be divine, in spite of her high cheek-bones and light green eyes à fleur de tête. But at a dinner-table, where a man likes to talk between the dishes, a sympathetic listener with pleasant manners, to whom he can air his stalest stories and recount his personal experiences, is preferable to the prettiest girl if a simpleton, only able to show her small white teeth in a silly smile, and say 'yes' and 'indeed' in the wrong places. The ball-room may be taken to represent youth; the dinner-table maturity. The one is the apotheosis of mere beauty, in clouds of millinery glory and a heaven of flirting; the other is solid enjoyment, with brains to talk to by the side and beauty to look at opposite, in just the disposition that makes life perfect. A well-ordered dinner-table is a social microcosm; and, being so, this is the blue riband of the arrangement.
Every woman is bound to make the best of herself. The strong-minded women who hold themselves superior to the obligations of dress and manner and all the pleasant little artificial graces belonging to an artificial civilization, and who think any sacrifice made to appearance just so much waste of power, are awful creatures, ignorant of the real meaning of their sex—social Graiæ wanting in every charm of womanhood, and to be diligently shunned by the wary.
This making the best of themselves is a very different thing from making dress and personal vanity the first considerations in life. Where women in general fail is in the exaggerations into which they fall on this and on almost every other question. They are apt to be either demireps or devotees; frights or flirts; fashionable to an extent that lands them in illimitable folly and drags their husbands' names through the mire, or they are so dowdy that they disgrace a well-ordered drawing-room, and among nicely-dressed women stand out as living sermons on slovenliness. If they are clever, they are too commonly blue-stockings, and let the whole household go by the board for the sake of their fruitless studies; and if they are domestic and good managers they sink into mere servants, never opening a book save their daily ledger, and having no thought beyond the cheesemonger's bill and the butcher's prices. They want that fine balance, that accurate self-measurement and knowledge of results, which goes by the name of common-sense and is the best manifestation of brains they can give, and the thing which men most prize. It is the most valuable working form of intellectual power, and has most endurance and vitality; and it is the form which helps a man on in life, when he has found it in his wife, quite as much as money or a good connexion.
So that, on the whole, brains are before beauty in the solid things of life. For admiration and personal love and youthful enjoyment, beauty of course is supreme; but as we cannot be always young nor always apt for pleasure, it is as well to provide for the days when the daughters of music shall be brought low and the years draw nigh which have no pleasure in them.
NYMPHS.
Between the time of the raw school-girl and that of the finished young lady is the short season of the nymph, when the physical enjoyment of life is perhaps at its keenest, and a girl is not afraid to use her limbs as nature meant her to use them, nor ashamed to take pleasure in her youth and strength. This is the time when a sharp run down a steep hill, with the chance of a tumble midway, is an exercise by no means objected to; when clambering over gates, stiles, and even crabbed stone-walls is not refused because of the undignified display of ankle which the adventure involves; when leaping a ditch comes in as one of the ordinary accidents of a marshland walk; and when the fun of riding is infinitely enhanced if the horse be only half broken or barebacked.
The nymph—an out-of-door, breezy, healthy girl, more after the pattern of the Greek Oread than the Amazon—is found only in the country; and for the most part only in the remoter districts of the country. In the town she degenerates into fastness, according to the law which makes evil merely the misdirection of force, as dirt is only matter in the wrong place. But among the mountains, in the secluded midland villages, or out on the thinly-populated moorland tracts, the nymph may be found in the full perfection of her nature. And a very beautiful kind of nature it is; though it is to be feared that certain ladies of the stricter sort would call her 'tomboy', and that those of a still narrower way of thought, unable to distinguish between unconventionality and vulgarity, would hold her to be decidedly vulgar—which she is not—and would wonder at her mother for 'letting her go on so.'
You fall upon the nymph at all hours and in all seasons. Indeed, she boasts that no weather ever keeps her indoors, and prefers a little roughness of the elements to anything too luscious or sentimental. A fresh wind, a sharp frost, a blinding fall of snow, or a pelting shower of rain are all high jinks to the nymph, to whom it is rare fun to come in like a water-dog, dripping from every hair, or shaking the snow in masses from her hat and cloak. She prefers this kind of thing to the suggestive beauty of the moonlight or the fervid heats of summer; and thinks a long walk in the crisp sharp frost, with the leaves crackling under her feet, worth all the nightingales in the wood. And yet she loves the spring and summer too, for the sake of the flowers and the birds and the beasts and the insects they bring forth; for the nymph is almost always a naturalist of the perceptive and self-taught kind, and has a marvellous faculty for finding out nests and rare habitats, and for tracking unusual trails to the hidden home.
There is no prettier sight among girls than the nymph when thoroughly at her ease, and enjoying herself in her own peculiar way. That wonderful grace of unconsciousness which belongs to savages and animals belongs to her also, and she moves with a supple freedom which affectation or shyness would equally destroy. To see her running down a green field, with the sunlight falling on her; her light dress blown into coloured clouds by the wind; her step a little too long for the correct town-walk—but so firmly planted and yet so light, so swift, so even!—her cheeks freshly flushed by exercise; her eyes bright and fearless; her white teeth shown below her upper lip as she comes forward with a ringing laugh, carrying a young bird which she has just caught, or a sheaf of wild flowers for which she has been perilling her neck, is to see a beautiful and gracious picture which you remember with pleasure all your life after. Or you meet her quite alone on a wide bleak moor, with her hat in her hand and her hair blowing
