Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/66

54 who not only approach the Swedes and Norwegians in the golden yellow of their hair, but who surpass any Northerner in the glistening whiteness of their skins, the dogma does not hold true. Brunettes are everywhere more numerous, and the colour of the hair of the larger number is a dark brown.

The perfect form of the hands and the smallness of the feet are remarkable in the Polish women. They even place the beauty of the hands above all other perfections. "I regard my hands, but not my face," said one, and one of them who otherwise thinks little about her appearance and is too cultivated to be vain, when her hands were frost-bitten in Paris, caused the most celebrated physician in the city to be sent for. Polish ladies maintain that when they visit the shoemakers' shops in Vienna and show their small feet with high insteps, the shoemakers exclaim: "Das kennen wir, das sind polnische Füsse!" (We know that those are Polish feet.) It is also said in Warsaw that in the Vienna shoe-shops they have a separate case of boots and shoes for these feet, and that its contents are widely different from that of the case designed for English ladies.

The prevailing view here, as in all other nationalities known to me, is, that the typical national woman lives for her home and children—perhaps more for the children than the husband, and that she rarely leads a life of love. Matrimony is not so paraded as in Germany, and is not so often the occasion of catastrophes as in France. The Polish women have hot heads, but their senses are under control.

Now and then a great irregularity happens: a lady leaves her husband and lives with her lover; a young girl marries her father's valet, and the like. They are the rare exceptions. When you meet an accomplished coquette in society, she is almost always of foreign descent. On the other hand, great examples of maternal sacrifice are by no means rare. Countess Rosa K., called the first lady in Poland on account of her family connections and fortune, has for years lived entirely alone in an unimportant mountain town in the Carpathian mountains, for the health of her feeble little son.