One of the services of true art is to hold before us models of beauty which keep the eye pure amid the corruptions of fashion. The Diana does not suggest any training of corsets or wearing of long skirts, yet poetry and fiction have helped to perpetuate this idea of the lady. Shakespeare has given us his Ophelia and Desdemona, creations of this false theory, and I have heard men declare them to be perfect types of womanhood. In Ruffini's charming story of _Doctor Antonio_, we have the same lovely heroine in our prosaic modern life. But mark how all these women utterly fail in the great hours of trial. All untrue to the demands of their love, all incapable of mating the men who have sought them. But in Portia, in Miranda, in Imogen, we have women in whom is all the charm of womanhood without its exaggeration; they are independent noble existences, capable of living alone, and therefore able to meet nobly all the conditions of life and of love.[28] We can almost forgive Charles Reade's later flippant creations of women, in whom moral weakness is considered as great a charm as physical delicacy, when we remember the charming picture of health and vigor which he first gave us in "Christie Johnstone." But while this admirable modesty of nature is the finest grace of humanity, yet there are limits which cannot safely be overpassed. Nature rarely suffers one sex really to pass the common boundary and take on the special attributes of the other, seeming only to permit these extreme cases as warning and landmark. The contralto in woman and the tenor in man are delightful, but when the woman's voice is bass or the man's treble the impression is ludicrous. In due time the great distinction of sex rightly asserts itself, and the delicate distinctions between man and woman, so easy to feel and so difficult to state, begin to be recognized. Then the broad general law of humanity will come to a more definite and varied expression in special natures. And although the mother will never forget the common ground of humanity which must underlie all training, she will prepare to meet the peculiar claims of her daughter's nature, and help her to understand and appreciate her needs and her powers.