"It is well the wretch has done my hair for to-night, though! That will be the main difficulty." "It will not be a great one," said Mary, "if you will allow me to undo it when you come home." "I begin almost to believe in a special providence," said Hesper.

"What a blessed thing for me that you came to drive away that woman! She has been getting worse and worse." "If I have driven her away," answered Mary, "I am bound to supply her place." As they talked, she was giving her final touches of arrangement to the head-dress--with which she found it least easy to satisfy herself.

It swept round from behind in a misty cloak, the two colors mingling with and gently obscuring each other; while, between them, the palest memory of light, in the golden cincture, helped to bring out the somber richness, the delicate darkness of the whole.
Searching now again Hesper's jewel-case, Mary found a fine bracelet of the true, the Oriental topaz, the old chrysolite--of that clear yellow of the sunset-sky that looks like the 'scaped spirit of miser-smothered gold: this she clasped upon one arm; and when she had fastened a pair of some ancient Mortimer's garnet buckles in her shoes, which she had insisted should be black, and taken off all the rings that Hesper had just put on, except a certain glorious sapphire, she led her again to the mirror; and, if there Hesper was far more pleased with herself than was reasonable or lovely, my reader needs not therefore fear a sermon from the text, "Beauty is only skin-deep," for that text is out of the devil's Bible.

No Baal or Astarte is the maker of beauty, but the same who made the seven stars and Orion, and His works are past finding out.
If only the woman herself and her worshipers knew how deep it is! But the woman's share in her own beauty may be infinitely less than skin-deep; and there is but one greater fool than the man who worships that beauty--the woman who prides herself upon it, as if she were the fashioner and not the thing fashioned.
But poor Hesper had much excuse, though no justification.

She had had many of the disadvantages and scarce one of the benefits of poverty.
She had heard constantly from childhood the most worldly and greedy talk, the commonest expression of abject dependence on the favors of Mammon, and thus had from the first been in preparation for _marrying money_.