And now, Jane, to be frank, I am very glad to be off my perch.

I do not want to dwell upon a pedestal.

It necessitates a monotonous life, and it is an unsocial position.

I prefer to walk on the earth, among my fellow creatures.

You were greatly shocked, I saw, when I told my little Russian guest that she might light her cigarette in my boudoir.  Your sudden departure told its own story, and your letter was no surprise.  But I am glad you wrote me so frankly, as it gives me the opportunity to be equally frank.

There is nothing more beneficial, in true friendship, than a free exchange of honest criticisms.

You tell me that I lowered my standard by lending countenance to a pernicious and unladylike habit.  You felt I owed it to myself, as a good woman, and to my home, as a respectable house, to show my unswerving principles in this matter, and to indicate my disapproval of a disgusting vice, which is growing in our midst.

Life is too short, my dear Jane, in which to achieve all our ideals, and to arrive at all our goals.

I have learned the futility of attempting to reform the whole world in one day.  And I have also learned that there are more roads than one, to all destinations.

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.