itudinous examples of American subserviency to the individual
woman,--which is part of a habit of exaggeration natural to a youthful
nation. There is an utter absence of all responsibility that is not the
concomitant of personal desire.

The new country is full of good impulses with little to bind them
together. Children respect their parents if they feel like it, just as
they are polite when in a responsive mood, not through any sense of
convention. The American press is an exemplification of this absence of
_noblesse oblige_, and more particularly in its treatment of women. Even
when not moved by personal jealousy or spite, the total lack of respect
with which the American press treats women who have not in any way
challenged public opinion--society women with whom the public has no
concern, women upon whom either the misfortune of circumstances or of a
powerful individuality has fallen--is the most significant foreboding of
the degeneration of a national character while yet half grown. It is
individualism, which is a polite term for rampant selfishness, run mad,
a fussy contempt and hatred for the traditions of older nations.

Fifty years ago, when the United States was still so old-fashioned as to
be hardly "American," it was more or less bound together by the
conventions it had inherited from the great civilisations that begat it.
These conventions exist to-day only in men of the highest breeding,
those with six or eight generations behind them of refinement,
consequence, and fastidiousness in association. In these men, the
representatives of an aristocracy that is in danger of being crippled
and perhaps swamped by plutocracy, exists the convention which forces
the most deplorable degenerate of old-world aristocracy to manifest
himself a gentleman in every crucial test. So thoroughly did Trennahan
comprehend these facts, so profound was his contempt for the second-rate
men of his country, that he was almost self-conscious about his honour.
He would no more have asked Magdalena to release him, nor have adopted
the still more contemptible method of forcing her to break the
engagement, than he would have been the ruin of an ignorant girl. But he
would have sacrificed every green blade in his soul to have met Helena
Belmont a year ago, and would have taken the chances with defiance and
the consequences without a murmur.

To marry Magdalena in June was impossible. That he should ever cease to
desire Helena Belmont, to