THE BROWN MAN’S APOLOGY
As I went down the stairs, dressed—if you could call it dressed—at last, how hideously conscious I was that I presented a spectacle of all that was least desirable in womanhood. Long familiarity with the fact had hardened me. I take it that no feminine thing becomes completely reconciled to the accident that she is not physically prepossessing. Women who are plain sometimes do not realise their plainness. I daresay that is true. Or they may cherish a hope that, in the eyes of someone, some day, they may not be plain. If, fatherless, brotherless, they live with five lovely sisters, and a still good-looking mother—who esteems beauty the only thing which is worth a woman’s having—both these consolations will be denied them. Long before they have reached years of matur
