ew minutes' talk; she
belongs to a set of which you remember to have already met a volume or
two. In some continental countries the patterns in common use seem
reduced to three or four. In the United States every new girl is a new
sensation. Society consists of a series of surprises. Expectation is
continually piqued. A and B and C do not help you to induce D; when you
reach Z you _may_ imagine you find a slight trace of reincarnation.
Not that the surprises are invariably pleasant. The very force and
self-confidence of the American girl doubly and trebly underline the
undesirable. Vulgarity that would be stolid and stodgy in Middlesex
becomes blatant and aggressive in New York.

The American girl is not hampered by the feeling of class distinction,
which has for her neither religious nor historical sanction. The
English girl is first the squire's daughter, second a good
churchwoman, third an English subject, and fourthly a woman. Even the
best of them cannot rise wholly superior to the all-pervading, and,
in its essence, vulgarising, superstition that some of her
fellow-creatures are not fit to come between the wind and her
nobility. Those who reject the theory do so by a self-conscious effort
which in itself is crude and a strain. The American girl is, however,
born into an atmosphere of unconsciousness of all this, and, unless
she belongs to a very narrow coterie, does not reach this point of
view either as believer or antagonist. This endues her, at her best,
with a sweet and subtle fragrance of humanity that is, perhaps,
unique. Free from any sense of inherited or conventional superiority
or inferiority, as devoid of the brutality of condescension as of the
meanness of toadyism, she combines in a strangely attractive way the
charm of eternal womanliness with the latest aroma of a progressive
century. It is, doubtless, this quality that M. Bourget has in view
when he speaks of the incomparable delicacy of the American girl, or
M. Paul Blouet when he asserts that "you find in the American woman a
quality which, I fear, is beginning to disappear in Paris and is
almost unknown in London--a kind of spiritualised politeness, a tender
solicitude for other people, combined with strong individuality."

There is one type of girl, with whom even the most modest and most
moderately eligible of bachelors must be familiar in England, who is
seldom in evidence in the United States--she whom the American
aborigines might call th