Is not this the moral of the fable on which the Arabian Nights are based?
An ugly wife of Henry VIII.

might have defied the axe, and subdued to herself the inconstancy of her master.
By a strange chance, not inexplicable, however, in a girl of Spanish origin, Madame Claes was uneducated.

She knew how to read and write, but up to the age of twenty, at which time her parents withdrew her from a convent, she had read none but ascetic books.

On her first entrance into the world, she was eager for pleasure and learned only the flimsy art of dress; she was, moreover, so deeply conscious of her ignorance that she dared not join in conversation; for which reason she was supposed to have little mind.

Yet, the mystical education of a convent had one good result; it left her feelings in full force and her natural powers of mind uninjured.