s,
waiting to be beckoned or whistled to by one of the sturdy youths with
skin-tight trousers, tucked into high boots, who by right of might, has
stationed himself on the platform. When they have danced, generally a
czardas, the girl goes back to the group of women, leaving the man on
the platform in command of the situation! Yet already in 1897 women were
being admitted to the University of Buda Pest. There in Hungary one
could see woman run the whole gamut of her development, from man's slave
to man's equal.

PLATE XXVII

Mrs. Vernon Castle in one of her dancing costumes.

She was snapped by the camera as she sprang into a pose of
mere joyous abandon at the conclusion of a long series of
more or less exacting poses.

Mrs. Castle assures us that to repeat the effect produced
here, in which camera, lucky chance and favourable wind
combined, would be well-nigh impossible.

[Illustration: _Mrs. Vernon Castle_
_A Fantasy_]

We found the national colour scheme to have the same violent contrasts
which characterise the folk music and the folk poetry of the Magyars.

Primitive man has no use for half-tones. It was the same with the
Russian peasants and with the Poles. Our first morning in Krakau a great
clattering of wheels and horses' hoofs on the cobbled court of our
hotel, accompanied by the cracking of a whip and voices, drew us to our
window. At first we thought a strolling circus had arrived, but no, that
man with the red crown to his black fur cap, a peacock's feather
fastened to it by a fantastic brooch, was just an ordinary farmer in
Sunday garb. In the neighbourhood of Krakau the young men wear frock
coats of white cloth, over bright red, short tight coats, and their
light-coloured skin-tight trousers, worn inside knee boots, are
embroidered in black down the fronts.

One afternoon we were the guests of a Polish painter, who had married a
pretty peasant, his model. He was a gentleman by birth and breeding, had
studied art in Paris and spoke French, German and English. His wife, a
child of the soil, knew only the dialect of her own province, but with
the sensitive response of a Pole, eagerly waited to have translated to
her what the Americans were saying of life among women in their country.
She served us with tea and liquor, the red heels of her high boots
clicking on the wooden floor as she moved about. As colour and as line,
of a kind, that young Polish woman w