Mrs. Stowe was of course confronted with the traditional question as to how the English ladies compared with those of America in beauty. When her turn came she said within herself, “Now for it, patriotism!” Then she assured the questioner that she had never seen more beautiful women anywhere than she had in her own country. But she had to admit that the English ladies held their beauty longer than did those of this country. Why was it? Was it the sea coal and fog that made the women of England preserve their glowing, radiant, blooming freshness till long past fifty? Tell us, Muses and Graces! she cried. Then she suggested various reasons: our close-heated rooms, our hot biscuits and hot corn cakes made with saleratus, our worry over maid service, our climate, and so on. The American woman is possessed, she thought, with the ambition to do the impossible, which is the cause of the death of a third of the women of this country, and by the impossible she means that they try to play not only the head of the family but the head, hand, and foot, all at once! Certainly the undaunted bravery of the American woman in her difficult home arrangements can never be enough admired. Speaking of stoves, she said that she never saw one in England. (This was in 1853.) Bright coal fires in grates of polished steel were still the lares and penates of old England. If there was one thing in her own country that she was inclined to mourn, it was the closing up of the cheerful open fire, with its bright lights and dancing shadows, and the planting on our domestic hearth of that sullen, stifling gnome, the air-tight. She agreed with Hawthorne in thinking the movement fatal to patriotism; for who would fight for an air-tight? One of the things that Mrs. Stowe noticed in England was that the distinguished people live so remarkably public a life. English newspapers told a great deal more about the concerns of the notable people than American papers tell: where the nobility were staying now, where they would go next, what they had for dinner, what they wore--all these things the English newspapers deemed important. And Mrs. Stowe was surprised also to have them take somewhat the same interest in her, even recording it when she had a dress made, and complaining that she sent it to a dress-maker of whom they did not approve!