Отрывок из книги
Max O'Rell
Published by Good Press, 2019
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Now, my dear man, if beauty should influence you in the choice of a wife, never decide on a woman before you are absolutely sure that, whatever happens, you will be happy with her as your wife knitting by your side, while, under a veranda covered with jasmine and honeysuckle, you play with the babe on your knees. If a woman does not possess that kind of beauty, she is not fit for matrimony, and don't marry her.
Now, a woman should marry young, very young even, so that her husband should enjoy all the different phases of her beauty, from the beauty of girlhood to that second youth, or matronly beauty, which to my mind is perhaps the best of all. The Watteau of eighteen will become a Rubens at forty. It is, perhaps, at forty that a woman is most strikingly beautiful, and she is almost invariably so when she has taken care of herself, and has been loved and petted by husband and children alike. It is then that she knows how to make the best of herself, that she best understands how to exercise her gifts and charms in the most effective manner.
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