of favorable circumstances, of which alternations of unburdened tranquillity with intervals of varied excitement of mind and body are among the most important.  Where sufficient excitement is wanting, as often happens in the country, the features, however rich in red and white, get heavy, and the movements sluggish; where excitement is furnished in excess, as is frequently the case in cities, the contours and colors are impoverished, and the nerves begin to make their existence known to the consciousness, as the face very soon informs us.

Helen Darley could not, in the nature of things, have possessed the kind of beauty which pleases the common taste.  Her eye was calm, sad-looking, her features very still, except when her pleasant smile changed them for a moment, all her outlines were delicate, her voice was very gentle, but somewhat subdued by years of thoughtful labor, and on her smooth forehead one little hinted line whispered already that Care was beginning to mark the trace which Time sooner or later would make a furrow.  She could not be a beauty; if she had been, it would have been much harder for many persons to be interested in her.  For, although in the abstract we all love beauty, and although, if we were sent naked souls into some ultramundane warehouse of soulless bodies and told to select one to our liking, we should each choose a handsome one, and never think of the consequences,—­it is quite certain that beauty carries an atmosphere of repulsion as well as of attraction with it, alike in both sexes.  We may be well assured that there are many persons who no more think of specializing their love of the other sex upon one endowed with signal beauty, than they think of wanting great diamonds or thousand-dollar horses.  No man or woman can appropriate beauty without paying for it,—­in endowments, in fortune, in position, in self-surrender, or other valuable stock; and there are a great many who are too poor, too ordinary, too humble, too busy, too proud, to pay any of these prices for it.  So the unbeautiful get many more lovers than the beauties; only, as there are more of them, their lovers are spread thinner and do not make so much show.

The young master stood looking at Helen Darley with a kind of tender admiration.  She was such a picture of the martyr by the slow social combustive process, that it almost seemed to him he could see a pale lambent nimbus round her head.

“I did not see you at the great party last evening,” he said, presently.

She looked up and answered, “No.  I have not much taste for such large companies.  Besides, I do not feel as if my time belonged to me after it has been paid for.  There is always something to do, some lesson or exercise,—­and it so happened, I was very busy last night with the new problems in geometry.  I hope you had a good time.”

“Very.  Two or three of our girls were there.  Rosa Milburn.  What a beauty she is!  I wonder what she feeds on!  Wine and musk and chloroform and coals of fire, I believe; I didn’t think there was such color and flavor in a woman outside the tropics.”