Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/404

 moods that blow: the social prattle lacks the tone of charming simplicity and ease. The face is subject to lowering weather when one of these women meditates a poisoning: there is one clinch of the teeth as the limbs collect to make a fatal spring, one glance askant at the person whom she is diplomatically entertaining with arrangements for his ruin. They cannot so readily nurse a fell purpose with a melting air of maternity which transpires in every line of the face and limbs, as the victim is held cosingly to the fatal breast. He is clutched a little too menacingly, and has time for a suspicion concerning the nutriment he is about to draw.

But when blonde women have a talent for mischief, they delicately distinguish themselves from the brunettes in the style of it. For downright, unadulterated mischief, let us be commended to the blonde women of the Indo-Germanic races. And frequently it is merely organic, with no more premeditation or sense of consciousness than a stinging-nettle has. They know how to be unaffectedly unscrupulous, as Miss Rosamond Vincy was in "Middlemarch," with a gay versatility that is rare in women of a differently-tempered color. Your riant blonde can drop a bolt from a clear sky, and scatter your long-projected picnic with sudden misery. As you look up, it is hardly credible: how or when did the weather change? You almost doubt the evidence of sense. Darnley must have been blown up by accident. There will always be two parties relative to any transaction which implicates a blonde woman, because her resources of demeanor are so ample, she can recur