HOW TO BE PRETTY THOUGH PLAIN.

Artful Beauty. " Girls have every chance to look pretty nowadays." So writes Mrs Humphry in the '• Daily Mail," and if they neglect those> chances it is certainly not Mrs Humphry's fault. The prevailing prettiness has not escaped a thoughtful reviewer ; but he confesses a. certain embarrassment in being led, as it were, to the toilette table and compelled to see beauty in the making. Really, this book should have been issued privately, and sold to no one who could not produce a birth certificate in proof of sex. If you see a girl of sixteen studying her face in the glass, do not run away with the idea that she is vain. Her motive is altruistic. She wants to know, "Am I plain?" If the girl decides she is plain, she may hereby learn how to hide her plainness ; if she is pretty, she may learn hew to be prettier still. In either case, she is generous in refusing to "bloom to • blush unseen," as Mrs Humphry quaintly misquotes. "Before deciding as to the arrangement of the hair, the nose should be carefully interrogated.'' Ifc is not grammar, but it is good sense. Everything else, we understand, may be hidden, altered, disguised. Even the lips and chin may be strengthened by the continual doing of noble deeds. But that js a long job. With the nose you can do nothing (though we 'have se«n advertisements^ — however . .). Taking the nose, then, as "given," the girl will interrogate it, and on its anbw«t will depend her coiffure. Does it answer to "snub"? Then let her 'hair bo coquettish, for Madonna bands are barred. The cogitative nose, long, and curved inwards towards the point, may startle the girl 'before the glass. Then let the hair be maasrrre in arrangement, so that length and breadth may balance to the comfort of beholders. The mouth is a difficulty to the girl before the glass ; for she does not know precisely -what the public demands. "A small mouth is the general ideal," we read. " Bub some latter-day artists have done much to disturb this impression," and certain novelists have put heroines on the marbet with mouths " large and full." What is the poor girl to do? A man- with the wrong mouth may slink through life under cover of a moustache and never be found out. Nature has denied woman such advantage. Mrs Humphry suggests a fan to hide " the most telling feature of the face." But there are moments when the girl must come out of cover of her fan — when she is driving at golf, for example. So porhaps she had better do noble de«ds and improve her mouth that way. We are not told, however, whether noble deeds produce an early Victorian or a "Blessed Damozel" mouth. And that is most important. But when she has arranged her' hair — with due reference to her nose — the girl before the glasshag to decide what to wear. And here again- she must interrogate the insistent,

the unalterable ncse. " The little mo.r?> and how much of it," she murmurs as she reaches for the largest available hat. Yet let her pau>p. In noses, as in pictures, size is not aU • colour counts. " With a n>at white nof-e one may wear almost, any style of hat or dress." " Writing from the empirical standpoint, we may add that, with an untidy red nose, it does net matter much what one wears, until one has taken Mrs Humphry's advice and let out a reef or two in the corset.