d as "American."

Whenever you have found what seems to be an "American" peculiarity, you
have only to cross a frontier or two, or go down or up in the social
scale, and you perceive that it has disappeared. And you can cross the
Atlantic and find it again. There may be a Newport religious drift, or
sporting drift, or conversational style or complexion, or cut of face,
but there are entire empires in America, north, south, east, and west,
where you could not find your duplicates. It is the same with everything
else which one might propose to call "American." M. Bourget thinks he
has found the American Coquette. If he had really found her he would
also have found, I am sure, that she was not new, that she exists in
other lands in the same forms, and with the same frivolous heart and the
same ways and impulses. I think this because I have seen our coquette; I
have seen her in life; better still, I have seen her in our novels, and
seen her twin in foreign novels. I wish M. Bourget had seen ours. He
thought he saw her. And so he applied his System to her. She was a
Species. So he gathered a number of samples of what seemed to be her,
and put them under his glass, and divided them into groups which
he calls "types," and labeled them in his usual scientific way with
"formulas"--brief sharp descriptive flashes that make a person blink,
sometimes, they are so sudden and vivid. As a rule they are pretty
far-fetched, but that is not an important matter; they surprise, they
compel admiration, and I notice by some of the comments which his
efforts have called forth that they deceive the unwary. Here are a few
of the coquette variants which he has grouped and labeled:

THE COLLECTOR.
THE EQUILIBREE.
THE PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY.
THE BLUFFER.
THE GIRL-BOY.

If he had stopped with describing these characters we should have been
obliged to believe that they exist; that they exist, and that he has
seen them and spoken with them. But he did not stop there; he went
further and furnished to us light-throwing samples of their behavior,
and also light-throwing samples of their speeches. He entered those
things in his note-book without suspicion, he takes them out and
delivers them to the world with a candor and simplicity which show that
he believed them genuine. They throw altogether too much light. They
reveal to the native the origin of his find. I suppose he knows how he
came to make that novel and captivating di