Garth reverently. "All true beauty comes from God, and
leads back to God. 'Every good gift and every perfect gift is from
above, and cometh down from the Father of lights.' I once met an old
freak who said all sickness came from the devil. I never could believe
that, for my mother was an invalid during the last years of her life,
and I can testify that her sickness was a blessing to many, and borne
to the glory of God. But I am, convinced all true beauty is God-given,
and that is why the worship of beauty is to me a religion. Nothing bad
was ever truly beautiful; nothing good is ever really ugly."

Jane smiled as she watched him, lying back in the golden sunlight, the
very personification of manly beauty. The absolute lack of
self-consciousness, either for himself or for her, which allowed him to
talk thus to the plainest woman of his acquaintance, held a vein of
humour which diverted Jane. It appealed to her more than buying
coloured air-balls, or screaming because the duchess wore a mushroom
hat.

"Then are plain people to be denied their share of goodness, Dal?" she
asked.

"Plainness is not ugliness," replied Garth Dalmain simply. "I learned
that when quite a small boy. My mother took me to hear a famous
preacher. As he sat on the platform during the preliminaries he seemed
to me quite the ugliest man I had ever seen. He reminded me of a
grotesque gorilla, and I dreaded the moment when he should rise up and
face us and give out a text. It seemed to me there ought to be bars
between, and that we should want to throw nuts and oranges. But when he
rose to speak, his face was transfigured. Goodness and inspiration
shone from it, making it as the face of an angel. I never again thought
him ugly. The beauty of his soul shone through, transfiguring his body.
Child though I was, I could differentiate even then between ugliness
and plainness. When he sat down at the close of his magnificent sermon,
I no longer thought him a complicated form of chimpanzee. I remembered
the divine halo of his smile. Of course his actual plainness of feature
remained. It was not the sort of face one could have wanted to live
with, or to have day after day opposite to one at table. But then one
was not called to that sort of discipline, which would have been
martyrdom to me. And he has always stood to my mind since as a proof of
the truth that goodness is never ugly; and that divine love and
aspiration shining through the plainest features m