And she will be healthy in body too, because pure in thoughts and kind in nature.
The Girl of Commerce.
You find her everywhere almost nowadays. She is not a natural production. She is got up. She is forced and artificial. She cannot be healthy, and has no more heart than a hen, no more stamina or staying power than a stalk of hemp. She is a resultant of the inflexible law of supply and demand. Made for the matrimonial market, grown to be sold, and if—like a choice standard rose—she is labelled with a title, she will go all the sooner. Money will purchase a wife like this, and, though marriage may change her and love may come after, the man who has her has speculated on the off-chance. And now that wax dolls can be manufactured that can both talk and walk, it seems to me that the man might have done better with his money. But, thank goodness, the majority of men prefer the genuine, well-reared, healthy girl, and the girl that has a heart.
But love is still a great factor—nay, the very greatest—in this life, and, if that love be real, oh, there is nothing it cannot do!
I must, as a medical man, go a little farther, and tell the mater something that no scientist will venture to deny. It is this: a loveless or commercial marriage is not only followed by a senseless and dreary monotonous life, but children born in such wedlock are never truly healthy in body, and very often they are defective in mental qualifications, that is, in brain power. Many a case of epilepsy is congenital, and a child that is nerveless is liable to future degeneracy, and apt to fall into any kind of temptation. Doctors have proofs of this every day.
But though ambitious parents may try to alter Nature’s law, she herself is inexorable and tells us sternly that the fittest shall survive.
But, harking back to our poet’s lines—
“From work she wins her spirits light,
From busy day, the peaceful night,”