ace which Time sooner or later would make a
furrow. She could not be a beauty; if she had been, it would have been
much harder for many persons to be interested in her. For, although in
the abstract we all love beauty, and although, if we were sent naked
souls into some ultramundane warehouse of soulless bodies and told to
select one to our liking, we should each choose a handsome one, and
never think of the consequences,--it is quite certain that beauty
carries an atmosphere of repulsion as well as of attraction with it,
alike in both sexes. We may be well assured that there are many persons
who no more think of specializing their love of the other sex upon one
endowed with signal beauty, than they think of wanting great diamonds or
thousand-dollar horses. No man or woman can appropriate beauty
without paying for it,--in endowments, in fortune, in position, in
self-surrender, or other valuable stock; and there are a great many who
are too poor, too ordinary, too humble, too busy, too proud, to pay any
of these prices for it. So the unbeautiful get many more lovers than
the beauties; only, as there are more of them, their lovers are spread
thinner and do not make so much show.

The young master stood looking at Helen Darley with a kind of tender
admiration. She was such a picture of the martyr by the slow social
combustive process, that it almost seemed to him he could see a pale
lambent nimbus round her head.

"I did not see you at the great party last evening," he said, presently.

She looked up and answered, "No. I have not much taste for such large
companies. Besides, I do not feel as if my time belonged to me after
it has been paid for. There is always something to do, some lesson or
exercise,--and it so happened, I was very busy last night with the new
problems in geometry. I hope you had a good time."

"Very. Two or three of our girls were there. Rosa Milburn. What a beauty
she is! I wonder what she feeds on! Wine and musk and chloroform and
coals of fire, I believe; I didn't think there was such color and flavor
in a woman outside the tropics."

Miss Darley smiled rather faintly; the imagery was not just to her
taste: femineity often finds it very hard to accept the fact of
muliebrity.

"Was"--?

She stopped short; but her question had asked itself.

"Elsie there? She was, for an hour or so. She looked frightfully
handsome. I meant to have spoken to her, but she slipped away before I
knew it."

"I th