He wants you to glow with health and vitality, and he would wish never to meet you after the days have passed leaving on the page of your face the furrows of neglect and wasting. He refuses to have you appear before him like flowers on the verge of wilting, because in his soul you are a living image of the splendor of beauty and the radiance of light. The day he met you for the first time — you remember — he stood struck dumb and began gathering his memory, so that you thought him tongue-tied, unable to speak. The truth is that he had begun fitting to your person the dream-bride who had accompanied him since his tenderest years — that free, pure girl, sound of build, light of movement, her spirit flying with hope yet perched upon the branch of composure — and behold, you were she. You must therefore remain she.
All the qualities that endear a woman are bound up with her personality: and that needs a study of its own. But it must be said that the firm cornerstone for the survival of those merits is food. The radiance of your face, the warmth of your love, the strength of your body, and your fitness for life depend on the timing, the quantity, and the kind you appoint for your food.
The timing must be regular: take no food between the appointed mealtimes. As for the quantity, it must claim your whole attention. And beware of slipping into certain habits which, though they do no harm at once, show their
harm in the future. Thus some women, following newfangled fashions, turn away from food for days, taking nothing but a few refreshments, seeking thereby slender waists and delicacy in all their limbs. If they achieve this, they achieve it only after it has dragged behind it a chain of aches and ailments — among them: nervous complaints, the dimming of the light of the eyes, the yellowing of the cheeks, weakness of the heart, and all else that comes of the exhaustion it bequeaths to the stomach — and the stomach is the house of disease. Many women have fallen into a habit whose danger they have rarely felt: one of them takes a little coffee in the morning, and no food at all, and
at midday contents herself with a simple "sandwich."
But when evening comes she falls upon supper with excessive greed and takes an enormous quantity to make up for what she has missed. This method — starvation at the day's beginning and surfeit at its close — is very harmful indeed.
The kind of food: It is well known that our foodstuffs are drawn from animal and plant. These supply us with what our bodies require for the steady maintenance of their heat and for the replacement of whatever wears out and frays, and they are the guarantors of preserving the splendor of your face and the beauty of your figure.