Dimples - Page 2

diamonds, rubies and other precious stones--who value their treasures
as their best possessions, and take them out from time to time to
examine and gloat over them. These things are trash to me compared with
the shining, fadeless images in my mind, which are my treasures and
best possessions. But the bright and beauteous images of the little
girl charmers would not have been mine if instead of letting the
originals disappear from my ken I had kept them too long in it. All
because our minds, our memories are made like that. If we see a thing
once, or several times, we see it ever after as we first saw it; if we
go on seeing it every day or every week for years and years, we do not
register a countless series of new distinct impressions, recording all
its changes: the new impressions fall upon and obliterate the others,
and it is like a series of photographs, not arranged side by side for
future inspection, but in a pile, the top one alone remaining visible.
Looking at this insipid face you would not believe, if told, that once
upon a time it was beautiful to you and had a great charm. The early
impressions are lost, the charm forgotten.

This reminds me of the incident I set out to narrate when I wrote
"Dimples" at the head of this note. I was standing at a busy corner in
a Kensington thoroughfare waiting for a bus, when a group of three
ladies appeared and came to a stand a yard or two from me and waited,
too, for the traffic to pass before attempting to cross to the other
side. One was elderly and feeble and was holding the arm of another of
the trio, who was young and pretty. Her age was perhaps twenty; she was
of medium height, slim, with a nice figure and nicely dressed. She was
a blonde, with light blue-grey eyes and fluffy hair of pale gold: there
was little colour in her face, but the features were perfect and the
mouth with its delicate curves quite beautiful.

But after regarding her attentively for a minute or so, looking out
impatiently for my bus at the same time, I said mentally: "Yes, you are
certainly very pretty, perhaps beautiful, but I don't like you and I
don't want you. There's nothing in you to correspond to that nice
outside. You are an exception to the rule that the beautiful is the
good. Not that you are bad--actively, deliberately bad--you haven't the
strength to be that or anything else; you have only a little shallow
mind and a little coldish heart."

Now I can imagine one of my lady readers crying out: "How dared you say
such monstrous things of any person after just a glance at her face?"

Listen to me, madam, and you will agree that I was not to blame for
saying these monstrous things. All my life I've had the instinct or
habit of