Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/111

108 objects of art on every side of them, exciting their minds through their sensations and filling them with images of beauty. There is, with us, far more necessity, and, of course, opportunity, for the development of a woman's faculties for domestic life, than here; but this, I think, is counterbalanced by women's necessary independence of the other sex here. On the whole, it seems to me there is not a more loveable or lovely woman than the American matron, steadfast in her conjugal duties, devoted to the progress of her children and the happiness of her household, nor a more powerful creature than the Englishwoman in the full strength and development of her character.

Now, my dear C., a word as to dress for the womankind of your family. I do not comprehend what our English friends, who come among us, mean by their comments on the extravagance of dress in America. I have seen more velvet and costly lace in one hour in Kensington Garden than I ever saw in New-York; and. it would take all the diamonds in the United States to dress a duchess for an evening at L—— house. You may say that lace and diamonds are transmitted luxuries, heir-looms (a species of inheritanc ewe know little about); still you must take into the account the immense excess of their wealth over ours, before you can have a notion of the disparity between us.

The women here up to five-and-forty (and splendid women many of them are up to that age) dress with taste—fitness; after that, abominably.