Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/210

 guard the complexion against the burning sun and scorching winds of those hot climates. The veil in our more temperate land serves the same purpose. It is an important article of the dress, and should be worn assiduously on going out in a damp and raw, or hot and dry atmosphere. In winter, the sudden change from our furnace-heated houses to the keen outdoor cold is very trying to the skin, and then especially is a thick veil of service. No cook can hope to have a good complexion, or a healthy skin, and it is because she is constantly exposed to just such changes from heat to cold.

Our ancestors were in this respect more careful than we. In the days of the second Charles, and Queen Anne, it was no unusual sight to see ladies in the London thoroughfares wearing masks or half masks, not, as you might suspect, bent on some wild freak, but simply for the purpose of protecting their complexions. In France, the home of coquetry, the usage was already ancient. Margaret of Navarre, queen of Henry IV., she whose wedding torches were quenched in the blood of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, was so in love with her mask that she refused to lay it aside even at night. This irritated her husband, with very good reason, we think, and was the first of a long series of "domestic infelicities." Henry was not choice in his expressions, and roundly said to her no long time after the wedding day:—