"The young American girl of our times is a creature who has not a particle of vitality to spare,--no reserved stock of force to draw upon in cases of family exigency. She is exquisitely strung, she is cultivated, she is refined; but she is too nervous, too wiry, too sensitive,--she burns away too fast; only the easiest of circumstances, the most watchful of care and nursing, can keep her within the limits of comfortable health; and yet this is the creature who must undertake family life in a country where it is next to an absolute impossibility to have _permanent_ domestics. Frequent change, occasional entire breakdowns, must be the lot of the majority of housekeepers,--particularly those who do not live in cities." "In fact," said my wife, "we in America have so far got out of the way of a womanhood that has any vigor of outline or opulence of physical proportions, that, when we see a woman made as a woman ought to be, she strikes us as a monster. Our willowy girls are afraid of nothing so much as growing stout; and if a young lady begins to round into proportions like the women in Titian's and Giorgione's pictures, she is distressed above measure, and begins to make secret inquiries into reducing diet, and to cling desperately to the strongest corset-lacing as her only hope. It would require one to be better educated than most of our girls are, to be willing to look like the Sistine Madonna or the Venus of Milo. "Once in a while our Italian opera-singers bring to our shores those glorious physiques which formed the inspiration of Italian painters; and then American editors make coarse jokes about Barnum's fat woman, and avalanches, and pretend to be struck with terror at such dimensions. "We should be better instructed, and consider that Italy does us a favor, in sending us specimens, not only of higher styles of musical art, but of a warmer, richer, and more abundant womanly life. The magnificent voice is only in keeping with the magnificent proportions of the singer. A voice which has no grate, no strain, which flows without effort,--which does not labor eagerly up to a high note, but alights on it like a bird from above, there carelessly warbling and trilling,--a voice which then without effort sinks into broad, rich, sombre depths of soft, heavy chest-tone,--can come only with a physical nature at once strong, wide, and fine,--from a nature such as the sun of Italy ripens, as he does her golden grapes, filling it with the new wine of song." "Well," said I, "so much for our strictures on Miss Letitia's letter. What comes next?" "Here is a correspondent who answers the question, 'What shall we do with her?'--_apropos_ to the case of the distressed young woman which we considered in our first chapter." "And what does he recommend?"