"
As they talked, she was giving her final touches of arrangement
to the head-dress--with which she found it least easy to satisfy
herself. It swept round from behind in a misty cloak, the two
colors mingling with and gently obscuring each other; while,
between them, the palest memory of light, in the golden cincture,
helped to bring out the somber richness, the delicate darkness of
the whole.
Searching now again Hesper's jewel-case, Mary found a fine
bracelet of the true, the Oriental topaz, the old chrysolite--of
that clear yellow of the sunset-sky that looks like the 'scaped
spirit of miser-smothered gold: this she clasped upon one arm;
and when she had fastened a pair of some ancient Mortimer's
garnet buckles in her shoes, which she had insisted should be
black, and taken off all the rings that Hesper had just put on,
except a certain glorious sapphire, she led her again to the
mirror; and, if there Hesper was far more pleased with herself
than was reasonable or lovely, my reader needs not therefore fear
a sermon from the text, "Beauty is only skin-deep," for that text
is out of the devil's Bible. No Baal or Astarte is the maker of
beauty, but the same who made the seven stars and Orion, and His
works are past finding out. If only the woman herself and her
worshipers knew how deep it is! But the woman's share in her own
beauty may be infinitely less than skin-deep; and there is but
one greater fool than the man who worships that beauty--the woman
who prides herself upon it, as if she were the fashioner and not
the thing fashioned.
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