. In the bleaching of the black and the grey, the change will
be the more striking in the former; the recovery of health will be
conspicuous in proportion to the gravity of the disease. America has
meant opportunity for women even more in some ways than for men. The
gap between them has been lessened in proportion as the gap between
the American and the European has widened. The average American woman
is distinctly more different from her average English sister than is
the case with their respective brothers. The training of the English
girl starts from the very beginning on a different basis from that of
the boy; she is taught to restrain her impulses, while his are allowed
much freer scope; the sister is expected to defer to the brother from
the time she can walk or talk. In America this difference of training
is constantly tending to the vanishing point. The American woman has
never learned to play second fiddle. The American girl, as Mr. Henry
James says, is rarely negative; she is either (and usually) a most
charming success or (and exceptionally) a most disastrous failure. The
pathetic army of ineffective spinsters clinging apologetically to the
skirts of gentility is conspicuous by its absence in America. The
conditions of life there encourage a girl to undertake what she can do
best, with a comparatively healthy disregard of its fancied
"respectability." Her consciousness of efficiency reacts in a thousand
ways; her feet are planted on so solid a foundation that she
inevitably seems an important constructive part of society. The
contrast between the American woman and the English woman in this
respect may be illustrated by the two Caryatides in the Braccio Nuovo
at the Vatican. The first of these, a copy of one of the figures of
the Erechtheum, seems to bear the superincumbent architrave easily and
securely, with her feet planted squarely and the main lines running
vertically. In the other, of a later period, the fact that the feet
are placed close together gives an air of insecurity to the attitude,
an effect heightened by the prevalence of curved lines in the folds of
the drapery.

The American woman, too, has had more time than the American man to
cultivate the more amiable--if you will, the more showy--qualities of
American civilisation. The leisured class of England consists of both
sexes, that of America practically of one only. The problem of the
American man so far has mainly been to subdue a new contine