lement
erstwhile known as Manhattan, on her part came forward with the rest to
the goal of identity. There were more women of fashion in Virginia and
Maryland than in Massachusetts or Connecticut; but the type was the
same, and a man might travel from Williamsburg to Boston, stopping on
his way at Annapolis, Philadelphia, and New York, and find no
considerable difference between the woman who sped him at the outset and
the woman who greeted him at the end of his journey,--at least as far as
the eye and ear could note. From Madame Berkeley to Madame Phips was no
step at all. The gracious dame of the period, stately in silks and
satins and brocade, was as easy to find at one end of the country as at
the other; the "toasts" were just as lovely, if not quite so plentiful,
in Boston as in Williamsburg. But all this gain, as is the inevitable
law, was at the expense of compensating loss. Refinement and elegance
had come to be the inheritance of the American woman, but at the cost
and loss of individuality. There had come into existence a type which
was neither Puritan nor Cavalier nor Dutch, but American; though a
universal type, it was not a distinctive one, as had been the others.
The word "American" had come to have a meaning of universality as
applied to the women of this country, and was yet to have a more
inclusive signification; but the passing of marked sectional differences
had also brought with it the doing away as well with that subtle thing
which we term individuality. As distinguished from her sisters of that
country which was still termed "mother," though so soon to be
encountered in bitter hatred, the American woman had lost definition and
personality.

We have now come to the period in our story when there will be no longer
distinction between the woman of the North and her sister in the South
in the things which have thus far kept them apart in type. They will
always preserve certain racial, climatic, and inherited traits peculiar
to their respective sections; but they will be none the less in mass the
women of America. Even when we shall be forced to record the great
dissension which separated our country into two nations and accentuated
all the sectional traits of its womankind as of its men there will be
but different expressions of womanhood to record, not different
types,--different conditions of existence, having effect of direction,
not differing spirits and impulses. It was in the days before the
dar