rstand, well for us
that we should preserve our singleness of taste through life. Some
contrive to do this, and never as long as they live are unfaithful to
the angel-blue eyes of their boyish love. Moralists have perhaps not
realized how much continence is due to a narrowness of aesthetic taste.
Obviously the man who sees beauty only in blue eyes is securer from
temptation than the man who can see beauty in brown or green eyes as
well; and how perilous is his state for whom danger lurks in all
beautiful eyes, irrespective of shape, size, or colour! And, alas! it is
to this state of eclecticism that most of us are led step by step by the
Mephistopheles of experience.

As great politicians in their maturity are usually found in the exact
opposite party to that which they espoused in their youth, so men who
loved blondness in boyhood are almost certain to be found at the feet of
the raven-haired in their middle age, and _vice versa_. The change is
but a part of that general change which overtakes us with the years,
substituting in us a catholic appreciation of the world as it is for
idealist notions of the world as we see it, or desire it to be. It is a
part of that gradual abdication of the ego which comes of the slow
realization that other people are quite as interesting as ourselves--in
fact, a little more so,--and their tastes and ways of looking at things
may be worth pondering, after all. But, O when we have arrived at this
stage, what a bewildering world of seductive new impressions spreads for
us its multitudinous snares! No longer mere individuals, we have not
merely an individual's temptations to guard against, but the temptations
of all the world. Instead of being able to see only that one type of
beauty which first appealed to us, our eyes have become so instructed
that we now see the beauty of all the other types as well; and we no
longer scorn as Philistine the taste of the man in the street for the
beauty that is robustly vital and flamboyantly contoured. Once we called
it obvious. Now we say it is "barbaric," and call attention to its
perfection of type.

The remembrance of our former injustice to it may even awaken a certain
tenderness towards it in our hearts, and soon we find ourselves making
love to it, partly from a vague desire to make reparation to a slighted
type, and partly from the experimental pleasure of loving a beauty the
attraction of which it was once impossible for us to imagine. So we fe