Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/390

374 here he would have sent a billy-goat as ambassador."

If I could ascribe design to nature, I could see behind this freak of afflicting man with a beard no other motive than that of helping along the barber business, or of thwarting physiognomy. While our women show us all the feature of their face openly, so that we can read everything that nature has imprinted there in her own language, our overgrown countenance is to them, if not a book with seven seals, at least one with an obscure text, from which they perhaps read something very different than it really contains. Who knows but that many a bride, who goes to the altar with a bearded man, would think of divorce on reaching home, if her new husband should happen to get shaved on the way? If I were a girl, I should only accept my husband from the hands of the barber, and should at most show some leniency toward his side whiskers, for I should want to see his true face,and only the face without the beard is the true face. But I should certainly not allow the beard to decide his manliness. We see many a man, viewing his surroundings from out of his shaggy face like a lion, seeking whom he may devour; but after he has been under the barber's care, a most pathetically innocent and childlike physiognomy will perhaps smile at us, so that a mother might be tempted to offer her breast to the lion. Nature seems to have supplied many a man with a beard for no other reason than that no other