to give value to the different accents of beauty.  The end of those women was worse than the beginning.  Simplicity is not ugliness, nor poverty, nor barrenness, nor necessarily plainness.  What is simplicity for another may not be for you, for your condition, your tastes, especially for your wants.  It is a personal question.  You go beyond simplicity when you attempt to appropriate more than your wants, your aspirations, whatever they are, demand—­that is, to appropriate for show, for ostentation, more than your life can assimilate, can make thoroughly yours.  There is no limit to what you may have, if it is necessary for you, if it is not a superfluity to you.  What would be simplicity to you may be superfluity to another.  The rich robes that Nausicaa wore she wore like a goddess.  The moment your dress, your house, your house-grounds, your furniture, your scale of living, are beyond the rational satisfaction of your own desires—­that is, are for ostentation, for imposition upon the public—­they are superfluous, the line of simplicity is passed.  Every human being has a right to whatever can best feed his life, satisfy his legitimate desires, contribute to the growth of his soul.  It is not for me to judge whether this is luxury or want.  There is no merit in riches nor in poverty.  There is merit in that simplicity of life which seeks to grasp no more than is necessary for the development and enjoyment of the individual.  Most of us, in all conditions; are weighted down with superfluities or worried to acquire them.  Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.

The needs of every person differ from the needs of every other; we can make no standard for wants or possessions.  But the world would be greatly transformed and much more easy to live in if everybody limited his acquisitions to his ability to assimilate them to his life.  The destruction of simplicity is a craving for things, not because we need them, but because others have them.  Because one man who lives in a plain little house, in all the restrictions of mean surroundings, would be happier in a mansion suited to his taste and his wants, is no argument that another man, living in a palace, in useless ostentation, would not be better off in a dwelling which conforms to his cultivation and habits.  It is so hard to learn the lesson that there is no satisfaction in gaining more than we personally want.

The matter of simplicity, then, comes into literary style, into building, into dress, into life, individualized always by one’s personality.  In each we aim at the expression of the best that is in us, not at imitation or ostentation.

The women in history, in legend, in poetry, whom we love, we do not love because they are “clad royally.”  In our day, to be clad royally is scarcely a distinction.  To have a superfluity is not a distinction.  But in those moments when we have a clear vision of life, that which seems to us most admirable and desirable is the simplicity that endears to us the idyl of Nausicaa.