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A woman conceals what she does not know.

Women and bairns lein [conceal] what they kenna.

"To a woman and a magpie tell what you would speak in the market-place" (Spanish).ssss1 Hotspur says to his wife,—

"Constant you are,

But yet a woman, and for secrecy

No lady closer; for I well believe

Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know,

And so far I will trust thee, gentle Kate."

But, if there is truth in proverbs, men have no right to reproach women for blabbing. A woman can at least keep her own secret. Try her on the subject of her age.

Beauty draws more than oxen.

"One hair of a woman draws more than a bell-rope" (German).ssss1

"And beauty draws us with a single hair."

Beauty buys no beef.

Beauty is no inheritance.

In spite of these curmudgeon maxims, let no fair maid despair whose face is her fortune, for "She that is born a beauty is born married" (Italian).ssss1

Beauty is but skin deep.

The saying itself is no deeper. It is physically untrue, for beauty is not an accident of surface, but a natural result and attribute of a fine organisation. A man may sneer, like Ralph Nickleby, at a lovely face, because he chooses rather to see "the grinning death's head beneath it;" but Ralph was a heartless villain, and that is only another name for a fool. "Beauty is one of God's' gifts," says Mr. Lewes, "and every one really submits to its influence, whatever platitudes he may think needful to issue.... How, think you, should we ever have relished the immortal fragments of Greek literature, if our conception of Greek men and Greek women had been formed by the contemplation of figures such as those of Chinese art? Would any pulse have throbbed at the Labdacidan tale had the descendants of Labdacus risen before the imagination with obese rotundity, large ears, gashes of mouths, eyes lurching upwards towards the temples, and no nose to speak of? Could we with any sublime emotions picture to ourselves Fo-Ti on the Promethean rock, or a Congou Antigone wailing her unwedded death?"