Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/30

 lies almost wholly aside from medical science, and within the exclusive jurisdiction of the artist.

But at the outset our fair reader who would be fairer must not understand us as promising too much. We do not come with an Elixir of Youth and Beauty, which she can drink at a draught, and bid defiance to Old Time? No! but in a hundred ways, here a little and there a little, by obeying rules of health, by diet and exercise, by devices of surgery, and by mysterious arts of pharmacy, she will learn how to transform herself from homely into passable, from passable into attractive, from attractive into beautiful.

Is this candid confession a disappointment?

Alas! after all, it is only by self-denial that we can gain anything of consequence in this disjointed world of ours. Il faut souffrir pour être belle; if we wish beauty, we must bear a smart or two. We must put up with them. There is no other way. Though many a one is like the French lady who announced her intention of visiting England, but declared she would not go by sea, as she was certain to be sea-sick.

"But, madame," objected one of her hearers, "England is an island."

"Oh yes, of course it's an island," she replied; "I know that well enough. But then, isn't there some way, perhaps, of passing around and reaching it by land?"