1. I have received several letters from young correspondents, complaining that I attach too much importance to beauty in women, and asking, “What are plain girls to do?”—one of them putting this farther question, not easy of answer, “Why beauty is so often given to girls who have only the mind to misuse it, and not to others, who would hold it as a power for God's service?” To which question, however, it is to be answered, in the first place, that the mystery is quite as great in the bestowal of riches and wit; in the second place, that the girls who misuse their beauty, only do it because they have not been taught better, and it is much more other people's fault than theirs; in the third place, that the privilege of seeing beauty is quite as rare a one as that of possessing it, and far more fatally misused.

The question, “What are plain girls to do?” requires us first to understand clearly what “plainness” is. No girl who is well-bred, kind, and modest, is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want of manners, or of heart. I may say, in defence of my own constant praise of beauty, that I do not attach half the real importance to it which is assumed in ordinary fiction;—above all, in the pages of the periodical which best represents, as a whole, the public mind of England.