er out of the face, it weakens it,
and certainly it detracts greatly from whatever natural beauty there
may have been to begin with. The expression which comes from pain or
any suffering well borne gives character to the face and adds to its
real beauty as well as its strength.

To remove the strained expression we must remove the strain behind;
therefore the hardest work we have to do is below the surface. The
surface work is comparatively easy.

I know a woman whose face is quiet and placid. The lines are really
beautiful, but they are always the same. This woman used to watch
herself in the glass until she had her face as quiet and free from
lines as she could get it--she used even to arrange the corners of her
mouth with her fingers until they had just the right droop.

Then she observed carefully how her face felt with that placid
expression and studied to keep it always with that feeling, until by
and by her features were fixed and now the placid face is always there,
for she has established in her brain an automatic vigilance over it
that will not allow the muscles once to get "out of drawing."

What kind of an old woman this acquaintance of mine will make I do not
know. I am curious to see her--but now she certainly is a most
remarkable hypocrite. The strain in behind the mask of a face which she
has made for herself must be something frightful. And indeed I believe
it is, for she is ill most of the time--and what could keep one in
nervous illness more entirely than this deep interior strain which is
necessary to such external appearance of placidity.

There comes to my mind at once a very comical illustration of something
quite akin to this although at first thought it seems almost the
reverse. A woman who constantly talked of the preeminency of mind over
matter, and the impossibility of being moved by external circumstances
to any one who believed as she did--this woman I saw very angry.

She was sitting with her face drawn in a hundred cross lines and all
askew with her anger. She had been spouting and sputtering what she
called her righteous indignation for some minutes, when after a brief
pause and with the angry expression still on her face she exclaimed:
"Well, I don't care, it's all peace within."

I doubt if my masked lady would ever have declared to herself or to any
one else that "it was all peace within." The angry woman was--without
doubt--the deeper hypocrite, but the masked woman had become