Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Aspasia, Petrarch’s Laura, had all crossed the line between youth and middle life, and there are no authentic proofs that any one of the number was a dazzling beauty.  Some of the world’s most alluring women have been absolutely plain.

You are not plain.  It is only by comparison that you so regard yourself.

There is much you can do to make yourself more attractive personally.  You know what Rochefoucauld said:  “No woman is in fault for not being beautiful at sixteen; any woman is in fault if she is not beautiful at forty.”

However much it may sound like a platitude, it is a great and eternal truth that your mental activities are chiselling your features.  By keeping yourself concerned with good, gracious, and great thoughts, you are shaping your face into a noble beauty minute by minute, and hour by hour.

Avoid as much as possible looking at repulsive and ugly objects.

Look at whatever is beautiful and seek for it.

Search for whatever is admirable in nature and human nature, and muse upon those things in your moments of solitude.

Cultivate love-thoughts for humanity at large.

Avoid severe criticisms, and develop sympathy and pity in your soul.  Study the comfort and pleasure of strangers in public places, and friends and associates in nearer relations.

Remember always how brief a thing, and ofttimes sad, life is to many, and seek to brighten and better it as you pass along.

Meanwhile, take care of your person, study your lines and your features, and learn how to dress and how to carry yourself; how to obtain “presence,” that indescribable charm in woman.

Take daily care of your complexion, which to a woman is of prime importance.

Call in the skill of the specialist to help you preserve and beautify your skin and hair, just as the dentist and the oculist are to be consulted to help you preserve teeth and eyes.  Think beauty for mind, soul, and body; live it, and believe it is your right.

And just as surely as you pursue this line of conduct for ten years, just so surely will you find yourself at thirty far more attractive than at twenty, and at forty more lovely than at thirty.  Learn to be a linguist, and acquire skill upon some one instrument, that you may entertain those who care to converse, and give pleasure to those who wish to be silent.

You are young, and life with its splendid possibilities is before you.  There is nothing a woman with youth, will-power, and love may not accomplish—­even to the convincing of the world that she is beautiful, when her mirror may say otherwise.

For enduring and all-encompassing beauty is a composite thing, and unless a woman possesses the spiritual and mental portions, the physical phase soon loses its attractions for the cultivated eye; while with the development of the first two, the third is certain to come.