led veins, what must lurk behind it?
Of what treacherous mysteries may it not be the screen? Does not the
heathen lacquer her dark face, and the harlot paint her cheeks, because
sorrow has made them pale?

After all, the old prejudice is a-dying. We need not pry into the secret
of its birth. Rather is this a time of jolliness and glad indulgence.
For the era of rouge is upon us, and as only in an elaborate era can
man, by the tangled accrescency of his own pleasures and emotions, reach
that refinement which is his highest excellence, and by making himself,
so to say, independent of Nature, come nearest to God, so only in an
elaborate era is woman perfect. Artifice is the strength of the world,
and in that same mask of paint and powder, shadowed with vermeil tinct
and most trimly pencilled, is woman's strength.

For see! We need not look so far back to see woman under the direct
influence of Nature. Early in this century, our grandmothers, sickening
of the odour of faded exotics and spilt wine, came out into the daylight
once more and let the breezes blow around their faces and enter, sharp
and welcome, into their lungs. Artifice they drove forth and they set
Martin Tupper upon a throne of mahogany to rule over them. A very reign
of terror set in. All things were sacrificed to the fetish Nature. Old
ladies may still be heard to tell how, when they were girls, affectation
was not; and, if we verify their assertion in the light of such literary
authorities as Dickens, we find that it is absolutely true. Women appear
to have been in those days utterly natural in their conduct--flighty,
fainting, blushing, gushing, giggling, and shaking their curls. They
knew no reserve in the first days of the Victorian era. No thought was
held too trivial, no emotion too silly, to express. To Nature everything
was sacrificed. Great heavens! And in those barren days what influence
did women exert! By men they seem not to have been feared nor loved, but
regarded rather as 'dear little creatures' or 'wonderful little
beings,' and in their relation to life as foolish and ineffectual as the
landscapes they did in water-colour. Yet, if the women of those years
were of no great account, they had a certain charm, and they at least
had not begun to trespass upon men's ground; if they touched not
thought, which is theirs by right, at any rate they refrained from
action, which is ours. Far more serious was it when, in the natural
trend of time, they