For this there were various reasons.
To begin with, she had a very plain face and she was entirely without
illusions as to her appearance. She had taken its measure to a hair's
breadth, she knew the worst and the best, she had accepted herself. It
had not been, indeed, without a struggle. As a young girl she had spent
hours with her back to her mirror, crying her eyes out; and later
she had from desperation and bravado adopted the habit of proclaiming
herself the most ill-favored of women, in order that she might--as in
common politeness was inevitable--be contradicted and reassured. It
was since she had come to live in Europe that she had begun to take the
matter philosophically. Her observation, acutely exercised here, had
suggested to her that a woman's first duty is not to be beautiful, but
to be pleasing, and she encountered so many women who pleased without
beauty that she began to feel that she had discovered her mission. She
had once heard an enthusiastic musician, out of patience with a gifted
bungler, declare that a fine voice is really an obstacle to singing
properly; and it occurred to her that it might perhaps be equally true
that a beautiful face is an obstacle to the acquisition of charming
manners. Mrs. Tristram, then, undertook to be exquisitely agreeable, and
she brought to the task a really touching devotion.
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