"I do believe, Julius, you are interested in Mary Marvel!"
"I am. I was always curious as to the different modes of suicide people adopt. Has she any occupation—any pleasure?"
"Oh, yes; she reads for ever, and studies; she is studying German now."
"Poor Mary!"
"What in the world makes you pity Mary, Julius?"
"Because, Anne, she hag been deprived of nature's best gift—defrauded of her inheritance: a sound constitution from temperate, active parents. One may have all the gifts, graces, charms, accomplishments, under Heaven, and, if they have not health, of what use or enjoyment are they? If that little, frail body of Mary Marvel's contained all that I have enumerated, it would be just the reverse of Pandora's box—having every good, but one curse that infected all."
"Dear Julius, I cannot bear to hear you talk so of Mary. I expected you would like her so much. I—I—hoped—. She is so pretty, so Lovely—she is fit for Heaven."
"She may be, Anne,—I do not doubt it; but she is very unfit for earth. What has her good, devoted, sensible, well-informed mother been about? If Mary had been taught the laws of health, and obeyed them, it would have been worth infinitely more to her than all she has got at your famous boarding-school, Ignorance of these laws is culpable in the mothers—disastrous, fatal to the daughters. It is a disgrace to our people. The young women now coming on, will be as nervous, as weak, as wretched, as their unhappy mothers—languishing embodiments of diseases—mementos of doctors and pill-boxes, dragging out life in air-tight rooms, religiously struggling to perform their duties, and dying before they have half finished the allotted term of life. They have no life—no true enjoyment of life!"
"What a tirade, Julius! Any one would think you were a cross old bachelor!"
"On the contrary, my dear Anne, it is because I am a young bachelor and desire not to be a much older one, that I am so earnest on this subject. I have been travelling now for two months in rail-cars and steamers, and I could fill a medical journal with cases of young women, married and single, whom I have met from town and country, with every ill that flesh is heir to. I have been an involuntary auditor of their charming little confidences of 'chronic headaches,' nervous feelings,' 'weak-backs,' 'neuralgia,' and Heaven knows what all!"