ost part
a hard-headed, solid-silver view of everything, and are but little
influenced by abstract conceptions. Their horizon is bounded by the rim
of the dollar. Nay, owing to the eager desire to get a good start by
beginning life early, their education itself is generally cut short at a
younger age than their sisters'; so that, even at the outset, the girls
have often a decided superiority in knowledge and culture. Amanda reads
Paul Bourget and John Oliver Hobbes; she has some slight tincture of
Latin, Greek, and German; while Cyrus knows nothing but English and
arithmetic, the quotations for prime pork and the state of the market
for Futures. Add to this that the women are more sensitive, more
delicate, more naturally refined, as well as unspoilt by the trading
spirit, and you get the real reasons for the marked and, in some ways,
unusual superiority of the American woman.

That, I think, in large part explains the fascination which American
women undoubtedly exercise over a considerable class of European men. In
the European man the American woman often recognises for the first time
the male of her species. Unaccustomed at home to as general a level of
culture and feeling as she finds among the educated gentlemen of Europe,
she likes their society and makes her preference felt by them. Now man
is a vain animal. You are a man yourself, and must recognise at once the
truth of the proposition. As soon as he sees a woman likes him, he
instantly returns the compliment with interest. In point of fact, he
usually falls in love with her. Of course I admit the large number of
concomitant circumstances which disturb the problem; I admit on the one
hand the tempting shekels of the Californian heiress, and on the other
hand the glamour and halo that still surround the British coronet.
Nevertheless, after making all deductions for these disturbing factors,
I submit there remains a residual phenomenon thus best interpreted. If
anybody denies it, I would ask him one question--how does it come that
so many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians marry American women, while
so few Englishwomen, French women, or Italian women marry American men?
Surely the American men have also the shekels; surely it is something
even in Oregon or Montana to have inspired an honourable passion in a
Lady Elizabeth or a dowager countess. I think the true explanation is
that our men are attracted by American women, but our women are not
equally attracted b