Beauty is defined by what he observes and endures rather than by what he chooses — which is itself the argument. He is patient, gentle, hardworking, and entirely dependent on the character of whoever owns him. His virtue is consistent across every context, which makes the variation in his circumstances entirely a function of human behavior. He is not a character in the conventional sense — he is a witness, a recorder, a device for making visible what the human characters cannot see about themselves.