One day an idle young man was wandering through the woods not far
from his town when he happened upon an old woman standing around a
rather smoky fire and stirring a kettle. Being the modern young man
that he was, he immediately blurted out his first impression:
"Gosh, you're ugly and whatever you're cooking stinks," he told her.
"Well, if you don't like my looks," answered the old woman, "I can
fix that." She then spoke a few strange words, which were followed
by a dramatic puff of smoke, and the young man discovered, not that
the old woman had transformed herself into a beautiful young maiden,
but that the young man could no longer see.
"Now I've protected you from all ugliness and every unpleasant
sight," said the woman. "And you'll remain this way until you can
find someone to marry you. And it will have to be someone who can
look beyond externals better than you, because I'm also changing
your looks a bit." Here the woman gave a little laugh and uttered a
few more unintelligible words. Soon there was another puff of smoke.
"Ooh, bummer," said the young man, feeling of the new bump on his
nose and the deep wrinkles now in his cheeks.
When the young man returned to town, he quickly discovered that his
social life was now pretty much a historical artifact. Whenever he
went to a party, the reaction was always the same.
"What's wrong with him?" some girl would ask.
"He's gotta look that way until someone marries him," would come
the reply.
"Hasn't that plot already been done?" the girl would say, walking
off in another direction.
But, hey, this is a fairy tale and I'm in a good mood so let's say
that finally, after many rejections, the young man found a nice girl
who actually loved him as he was.
As the young man got to know her, he kept trying to imagine what she
looked like. After awhile, he constructed a picture of her in his
mind, so that whenever he looked in her direction, his imagined
vision of her came before his eyes so vividly that he felt he could
almost see her. He thought that he could very nearly see the slight
curve of her lips, the sunlight shining in her hair, the expressions
of delight or concern on her brow.
Well, anyway, things worked out so well that pretty soon the girl's
father was mortgaging his house to pay for the wedding.
When the bride and groom awoke on the first day of their honeymoon,
the young man discovered that his eyes had been opened. However, he
also discovered that the girl lying beside him did not have the deep
blue eyes with long eyelashes, or the upturned nose with little
freckles of the girl he had been seeing in his mind. The young
man, still in the habit of blurting out his first impression, said,
"Gosh, you've changed."
"No," said his new wife. "The only thing that's changed is that now
you can see. Oh, and you no longer have a bump on your nose."
"But where's your blonde hair?" the young man asked.
"My hair has always been this color," the girl said, fingering her
chestnut tresses.
"But you look so different," the young man said, still confused.
"When you looked at me before," the girl explained, "you saw only
your imagination. This is what I'm really like."
"I see," said the young man, as he embraced her and began to give
her a thousand kisses.
"I know," she said.