It was our Sabbath day custom to pass directly from the church services to those of Sunday school, and drive home after these. One stormy day I was the only scholar in my class, and when we had finished the Bible Lesson Leaflets and I was watching the long rows of bobbing heads, flaxen and dark, in the pews full of restless, wriggling children, I turned to the teacher with a question that I had long been meditating.
"Miss Coleman," I began desperately, "ain't there any way to get pretty?"
"I wish there were a way and I knew it," she responded with a smile. "But you should say 'isn't,' you know."
"Oh, but you are pretty," I cried, not with the intent of compliment, but as merely stating a fact.
I do not now think that it was a fact. Miss Coleman's features were irregular, her nose prominent, her forehead too high; but she had a fair, pure complexion and fine eyes, and somehow reminded me of the calla lilly that Ma was always fussing about in our sitting room.
And she was good and wise. I have often thought how different my life might have been if her orbit had not briefly threaded mine. If I had asked that question of some simpering girl a few years older than I--the average Sunday school teacher--she would have replied, from under the flower- burdened hat that had cost her so much thought, that all flesh was grass and beauty vain; and I should have known that she didn't believe it.
"For that matter," said Miss Coleman, after a little pause in which she seemed considering her words with more than usual care, "there are ways of growing beautiful; and, so far as she can, it is a woman's duty to seek them; would you like to know how?"
A duty to be beautiful! Here was novel doctrine.
I gazed with eyes and mouth wide open as she continued: "For one with good lungs and a sound body, the first law of beauty is to be healthy; and health is not just luck. To get it and keep it seek constant exercise in the open air. Middle-aged women lose their looks because they stay in too constantly; when they were girls and played out-of-doors they had roses in their cheeks. Most handsome women of sixty are those who go among people and keep their interest in what is going on.
"And the second law is intelligence. For thinking gives the eyes expression. A foolish girl may be fair and rosy, yet far from beautiful. Many of the world's famous beauties have suffered serious blemishes; but they have all had wit or spirit to give their faces charm. You have planted flowers?"