sense, and take it for granted that she is incapable of deep feeling,
for the altogether inadequate reason that she has a certain resemblance
to a teapot. Now is it not hard that a person may have a soul as
beautiful as an angel's, a dwelling-place for all sweet sounds and
harmonies, and if nature has not thought fit to endow his body with a
chin the world will have none of him? The vulgar prejudice is in favour
of chins, and who shall escape its influence? I, for one, cannot, though
theoretically I utterly reject the belief that the body is the likeness
of the soul; for has not each of us friends who, we know, love beyond
everything that which is noble and good, and who by no means themselves
look noble and good? And what about all the beautiful persons who love
nothing on earth except themselves? Yet who in the world cares how
perfect the nature may be, how humble, how sweet, how gracious, that
dwells in a chinless body? Nobody has time to inquire into natures, and
the chinless must be content to be treated in something of the same
good-natured, tolerant fashion in which we treat our poor relations
until such time as they shall have grown a beard; and those who by their
sex are for ever shut out from this glorious possibility will have to
take care, should they be of a bright intelligence, how they speak with
the tongues of men and of angels, nothing being more droll than the
effect of high words and poetic ideas issuing from a face that does not
match them.

I wish we were not so easily affected by each other's looks. Sometimes,
during the course of a long correspondence with a friend, he grows to be
inexpressibly dear to me; I see how beautiful his soul is, how fine his
intellect, how generous his heart, and how he already possesses in great
perfection those qualities of kindness, and patience, and simplicity,
after which I have been so long and so vainly striving. It is not I
clothing him with the attributes I love and wandering away insensibly