They were more to one another, I felt
sure, than friend or relative. There was love, quiet, steady,
absorbing love in his great dark eyes, as if in resting upon the
beauty of that other face they had found happiness and repose forever.
They even suggested something of a reproachful love, as if they found
those attractions too winning, and not human enough. I almost coveted
the respectfully devouring glance of those contemplative brown eyes,
for we women with faces of very ordinary fabric cannot believe that
men love us altogether as they would if our cheeks were like damask
roses and our eyes like dew-kissed violets. Nor do we blame them. Yet
how often does it come to pass that a woman's beauty is the
stumbling-block to her earthly happiness? With only a face for her
fortune, many a bright-eyed, laughing belle has gone out to seek
sorrow and misery. The world is full of them, they are rolling in easy
carriages up and down the thoroughfares of life, each a pampered and
dearly bought idol of some powerful old Croesus, whom to love would be
to outrage every principle of nature and worthy sentiment, and,
therefore, to live upon milk and honey and be clad in the finest of
purple, beauty will sanction her own destruction, living a loveless
life, ever haunted by a memory of something brighter and happier that
might have been. And all for this, that others may look with
admiration, and possibly with envy upon her glittering wealth, or that
she may reflect some of the social power and prestige of the man who
marries her.
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