willingly exchange all her knowledge of
German and Italian, and all her graceful accomplishments, for a good
physical development, and some respectable _savoir faire_ in ordinary
life.

"Moreover, American matrons are overworked because some unaccountable
glamour leads them to continue to bring up their girls in the same
inefficient physical habits which resulted in so much misery to
themselves. Housework as they are obliged to do it, untrained,
untaught, exhausted, and in company with rude, dirty, unkempt
foreigners, seems to them a degradation which they will spare to their
daughters. The daughter goes on with her schools and accomplishments,
and leads in the family the life of an elegant little visitor during
all those years when a young girl might be gradually developing and
strengthening her muscles in healthy household work. It never occurs
to her that she can or ought to fill any of the domestic gaps into
which her mother always steps; and she comforts herself with the
thought, 'I don't know how; I can't; I haven't the strength. I can't
sweep; it blisters my hands. If I should stand at the ironing-table an
hour, I should be ill for a week. As to cooking, I don't know anything
about it.' And so, when the cook, or the chambermaid, or nurse, or all
together, vacate the premises, it is the mamma who is successively
cook, and chambermaid, and nurse; and this is the reason why matrons
fade and are overworked.

"Now, Mr. Rudolph, do you think a woman any less beautiful or
interesting because she is a fully developed physical being,--because
her muscles have been rounded and matured into strength, so that she
can meet the inevitable emergencies of life without feeling them to be
distressing hardships? If there be a competent, well-trained servant
to sweep and dust the parlor, and keep all the machinery of the house
in motion, she may very properly select her work out of the family, in
some form of benevolent helpfulness; but when the inevitable evil hour
comes, which is likely to come first or last in every American
household, is a woman any less an elegant woman because her love of
neatness, order, and beauty leads her to make vigorous personal
exertions to keep her own home undefiled? For my part, I think a
disorderly, ill-kept home, a sordid, uninviting table, has driven more
husbands from domestic life than the unattractiveness of any
overworked woman. So long as a woman makes her home harmonious and
orderly, so