Women to Women.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 879, 4 January 1889, Page 4

Women to Women.

Women ought to be kinder to each other, the pretty ones to the plain, because of what they mica in the gift and power of beauty the plain to the beautiful for the certain bitter in their experience. I have known women .to whom their unoommon beauty was an annoyance, almost a curse. In my school days a girl of Southern beauty, with peachy cheeks and dark, velvety eyes, used to be so plagued by the insolent, persecuting admiration of men on the cars that she gave np going into Boston for lessons. There was no affectation about it. She was a modest, well-bred girl, and the notice she attracted would have been odious to any woman. Extremely beautiful women are not seldom genuinely modest and unconcerned about their looks, far more so than plainer ones, anxious to ‘ cultivate beauty.’ One of the most charming women of the Philip Livingstone family once told me she never know Bhe was at all pretty till she went to Europe, long past thirty. Of course Bhe said, she knew her husband thought she was good-looking, but she supposed it was his partiality 1 If you can’t see a kind of simplicity in this, sweeter than roses and milk complexions, or jewelry eyes, I am very sorry. To women who havo there own way to make in the world, good looks, be. yond a decent, unobtrusive comeliness, are as much weight to carry as advantage. In the first place, no matter how modest, how worthy in themselves, they run dead against some woman’s jealousy, and it will go bard, but she can embitter life for them. The malignancy of women toward women is something incomprehensible, enduring and of a fiendish capability. It is the insanity of female natures. They cannot endure or believe in anything frank, generous and free of spirit. They would have all women secretive, crafty, calculating as themselves. We are on the verge of times that will call for more than beauty in women—more than cleverness in men. We have but twentyfive years taken breath from a conflict that was but preliminary to the wider struggle against injustice, not to race only, but to all people, in all relation in our own right hands and in our own hearts. If there is not found with women faith, truth, and that kindness which is God’s likeness, then and before then, the striving for place and rule, the bitter, ness and jealousy shall in faded and lustreless womanhood fulfil the word ‘for sweet smell, offence ; for well-set hair, baldness ; and burning for beauty.’—Sidney Dare,