Miss Ordosky is the daughter of a dear old friend of my youth, who married a Russian nobleman with more titles than dollars.
Her parents are dead, and Wanda has come to her mother's native land, to teach her father's language. She has come with all her Russian habits and ideas accented by her mother's American indifference to public opinion. The girl is young, lovely, and wholly dependent upon herself for a livelihood. I invited her to be my guest for two months, before establishing herself in her business, with the hope of helping her to adapt herself somewhat to American ideas and customs.
I could never hope for such a result, had I antagonized her the first day under my roof by an austere attitude toward a habit which I knew she had been reared to think proper.
I do not like to see a woman smoke, and I regret as much as you do the increasing prevalence of the vice in America.
Like almost every schoolgirl, I had my day of thinking a surreptitious, cigarette was wonderfully cunning.
That day passed, like the measles and the whooping-cough, and left me immune. I have never seen a woman so beautiful and alluring that she was not less charming when she put a cigarette to her lips. I am confident the habit vitiates the blood, injures the digestion, and renders the breath offensive. I have known many American men who taught their wives to smoke; and I do not know one who has not lived to regret it, when the cigarette he fancied would be an occasional luxury became a necessity.
A woman who expects ever to bring children into the world, is little better than a criminal to form such a habit: for, argue as we may for one moral code for both sexes, we cannot change nature's law, which imposes the greater responsibility upon the mother of the unborn child; the child she carries so many months beneath her heart, giving it hour by hour the impression of her mental and physical conditions.
Fathers ought not to smoke or indulge in other bad habits.
Mothers must not.
I hope in time to discuss these topics with Wanda, and to make an impression upon her mind by my arguments.