Page:A Few Hours in a Far Off Age.djvu/46

Rh health of which is requisite for healthy mind. Your crooked shoulders, the result of vain endeavours to move and breathe easily under so idiotic a régime. Your painted cheeks. Your black daubs over eyebrows,—the repulsive dirty sham plainly lying on the skin between the hairs. And a fitting crown to all that degrading deception is the impure false hair, which you imagine decorates your narrowed, distorted-looking head—a head Nature intended should have been intellectual, kind and truthful in form.

And there you are, likewise, hideous young man contemporary! Stilts under your boots. Ungraceful clothes. Hair cut in patterns on face to resemble the natural growth of your ape-relative's whiskers. Head shorn of its ornamental covering, leaving the ears standing out resembling ugly handles to an ugly bowl; altogether giving the unfortunate owner an appearance of having been modelled while in the crisis of a dangerous disease.

Worthy male for such a female, to the world's distraction! For how can aught but retrogression proceed from the union of two such fools! Oh, women! awaken to your responsibilities. Be it plainly understood I address only those whose type is in this case for a far-off age to learn what shams they are. Abandon your shameful practical lying. Where is the benefit it brings you? No mental improvement. No physical beauty. It only begets the short-lived admiration of semi-idiots, or the worship of deceived boys, whose inevitable enlightenment brings so fierce a contempt for the whole of our sex, that I have known it last until it became part of nature—not, alas! to be uprooted by even honourable and truthful women. Should you marry any so deceived is it possible you could expect your husbands to respect women who would sink to such pitiful means to