OCR Text |
Show I BOSTON LADIES. The most attractive element of every European Boeiety, the young married ladies, are seldom to bo met with hero. The moment a girl marries, she becomes condemned to a partial seclusion, or goes for a , couple of years abroad, returns with a baby or two, and settles down to her household duties and to the further cultivation of such knowledge or tastes aa she may have acquired in London, Paris, Home or Florence. It is only when her daughter grows up, that she becomes again an active member of all tho sociables of her circle. This ciru instance, combined with some others mentioned in a previous letter, makes the Boston girls not anxious at all to marry early. "We have too good a time of it as long as we remain girls to hurry with marriage," they say; and accordingly ac-cordingly they flirt, dance, dress, gossip, tako French and Italian lessons, les-sons, and read silly books until they get thoroughly sick of all that. Upon the whole, the Bystem in itself is not an objectionable one, for young pea-pie pea-pie thus get more time to Btudy each ether, happy marriages are rendered more possible, the families cannot grow so largo as they do in the old country, and intellectual pursuits are consequently not necessarily sacrifled to money-making. But the thing ia carried too far here. The Bmall number of children in Boston fAmilpc ;a nnm.liarU f.;u;n. t and has been often accounted for in a very unpleasant way., I believe, however, that late marriages, a craving crav-ing for what is supposed to be an intellectual in-tellectual life, and the generally sickly constitHtions of New England ladies will suffice to explain the faet. Far from being a subject of regret, it ought to be considered a very lucky tiling that tho tbin-boned, pale-Jaced, lymphatic misses of Boston seldom produce more than one or two babies when they marry. It would be almost al-most a crime on their part to go beyond that, until by a thorough change in the regimen of life, the New England race has been improved. im-proved. Pale faces and attenuated figures must first be abolished, and this can only be done when the ladies begin to tako exercise and live upon something more substantial than ice cream or cakes. Dancing in a suffocated suf-focated room is not exercise, and three or four .plates of iced water or milk with sugar in it are not foodv Both are poisons, and the more one takes of them the worse must one be off. Yet that is all Boston ladies take as a rule after a day spent in gossiping, reading a mass of useless books, and getting excited over no end of inane social and philosophical problems, to which no reasonable human being ought to pay any attention. What they call culture here is simply a superficial acquaintance with little bits of everything that has been produced pro-duced in the way of "fine" magazine and novel reading since the world's creation. They don't know their own country; they have no idea of the laws which regulate their own organisms; they don't know how to cook a ptatoe or to mend their own dresses; but they know all the passages pas-sages in which Mrs. Florence Marryat, oS London Society celebritv. referred verse of Tennyson's idiotic poems. "Stranger," in New York Sun. - |