ad beauty, pleasure,
flattery: but what secret rages, disappointments, defeats, humiliations!
what thorns under the roses! what stinging bees in the fruit! "You are
not a beauty, my dear," she would say to my wife: "and may thank your
stars that you are not." (If she contradicted herself in her talk, I
suppose the rest of us occasionally do the like.) "Don't tell me that
your husband is pleased with your face, and you want no one else's
admiration! We all do. Every woman would rather be beautiful than be
anything else in the world--ever so rich, or ever so good, or have all
the gifts of the fairies! Look at that picture, though I know 'tis but a
bad one, and that stupid vapouring Kneller could not paint my eyes, nor
my hair, nor my complexion. What a shape I had then--and look at me now,
and this wrinkled old neck! Why have we such a short time of our beauty?
I remember Mademoiselle de l'Enclos at a much greater age than mine,
quite fresh and well-conserved. We can't hide our ages. They are wrote
in Mr. Collins's books for us. I was born in the last year of King
James's reign. I am not old yet. I am but seventy-six. But what a wreck,
my dear: and isn't it cruel that our time should be so short?"

Here my wife has to state the incontrovertible proposition, that the
time of all of us is short here below.

"Ha!" cries the Baroness. "Did not Adam live near a thousand years, and
was not Eve beautiful all the time? I used to perplex Mr. Tusher with
that--poor creature! What have we done since, that our lives are so much
lessened, I say?"

"Has your life been so happy that you would prolong it ever so much
more?" asks the Baroness's auditor. "Have you, who love wit, never read
Dean Swift's famous description of the deathless people in Gulliver? My
papa and my husband say 'tis one of the finest and most awful sermons
ever wrote. It were better not to live at all, than to live without
love; and I'm sure," says my wife, putting her handkerchief to her eyes,
"should anything happen to my dearest George, I would wish to go to
Heaven that moment."

"Who loves me in Heaven? I am quite alone, child--that is why I had
rather stay here," says the Baroness, in a frightened and rather piteous
tone. "You are kind to me, God bless your sweet face! Though I scold,
and have a frightful temper, my servants will do anything to make me
comfortable, and get up at any hour of the night, and never say a cross
word in answer. I like my cards sti