For beauty is both a very great gift and a very hard thing to handle.
Some of you must know that you are beautiful, and you are sure to find
the fact exciting, delightful, and yet embarrassing. You have great
powers--powers over other women and over children in part--and very
great powers over men. You can, if you will, use that power to induce
men to make fools of themselves. You can let yourselves slip into the
habit of living on admiration and feeding on the pleasure it gives
you. You can exploit your beauty to win through it things you do not
really deserve. People will forgive much to a beautiful woman, and you
can trade on that fact. You can get a great deal of your own way if you
master the art of being charming as well as beautiful; and you can in
that way use your beauty to your own undoing, and make it partly a
curse to others. In fact you are certain to have to face many
temptations which the majority of women escape. That is the hard part
of your lot. All who understand know quite well that life cannot but be
more complicated for you than for most, and you have a very great claim
on their sympathy. But the way to avoid your dangers is not to pretend
to yourself that you are not beautiful. Pretence never helps us. The
way is to face the fact of your beauty, realize that you did not create
it, and therefore need not be vain about it, and then go on to decide
what use you are going to make of the power it gives you. It can be
used for God--otherwise He would not have given it. It can be turned
into influence of a very wonderful kind. If you can induce men to make
fools of themselves, you can also draw out all that is best in them,
and inspire them for fine living. In plain English, when a beautiful
woman is also a good woman she is one of the greatest boons to mankind.
She can give great pleasure to others--but she can do more, she
can stir the latent idealism in men and women in wonderful ways. She
can move through the world as a source of gracious, kindly, and bracing
influence. Of course, once again, the essential secret is to think of