“I can’t see the thing in that light, Mrs. Follingsbee,” said old Mrs. Ferguson.  “I don’t understand this modern talk.  I am sure, for one, I can say I have had all the career I wanted ever since I married.  You know, dear, when one begins to have children, one’s heart goes into them:  we find nothing hard that we do for the dear little things.  I’ve heard that the Parisian ladies never nurse their own babies.  From my very heart, I pity them.”

“Oh, my dear madam!” said Mrs. Follingsbee, “why insist upon it that a cultivated, intelligent woman shall waste some of the most beautiful years of her life in a mere animal function, that, after all, any healthy peasant can perform better than she?  The French are a philosophical nation; and, in Paris, you see, this thing is all systematic:  it’s altogether better for the child.  It’s taken to the country, and put to nurse with a good strong woman, who makes that her only business.  She just lives to be a good animal, you see, and so is a better one than a more intellectual being can be; thus she gives the child a strong constitution, which is the main thing.”

“Yes,” said Miss Letitia; “I was told, when in Paris, that this system is universal.  The dressmaker, who works at so much a day, sends her child out to nurse as certainly as the woman of rank and fashion.  There are no babies, as a rule, in French households.”

“And you see how good this is for the mother,” said Mrs. Follingsbee.  “The first year or two of a child’s life it is nothing but a little animal; and one person can do for it about as well as another:  and all this time, while it is growing physically, the mother has for art, for self-cultivation, for society, and for literature.  Of course she keeps her eye on her child, and visits it often enough to know that all goes right with it.”

“Yes,” said Miss Letitia; “and the same philosophical spirit regulates the education of the child throughout.  An American gentleman, who wished to live in Paris, told me that, having searched all over it, he could not accommodate his family, including himself and wife and two children, without taking two of the suites that are usually let to one family.  The reason, he inferred, was the perfection of the system which keeps the French family reduced in numbers.  The babies are out at nurse, sometimes till two, and sometimes till three years of age; and, at seven or eight, the girl goes into a pension, and the boy into a college, till they are ready to be taken out,—­the girl to be married, and the boy to enter a profession:  so the leisure of parents for literature, art, and society is preserved.”

“It seems to me the most perfectly dreary, dreadful way of living I ever heard of,” said Mrs. Ferguson, with unwonted energy.  “How I pity people who know so little of real happiness!”

“Yet the French are dotingly fond of children,” said Mrs. Follingsbee.  “It’s a national peculiarity; you can see it in all their literature.  Don’t you remember Victor Hugo’s exquisite description of a mother’s feelings for a little child in ‘Notre Dame de Paris’?  I never read any thing more affecting; it’s perfectly subduing.”