in certain streets of certain
cities, at certain hours of the day, no women walk unattended except
such as desire to be insulted, it is probable that other women, who go
there in ignorance, will suffer inconvenience. Nor has the difference in
local custom any bearing whatever on the respective morality of
different localities. These things are arranged differently in different
countries; that is all. Moreover, in this particular a great change has
come over American cities in late years, nor are all American cities or
all English by any means alike.

A similar change has come in the matter of "ladies' entrances" to
hotels. If the provision of the separate doors was a sign of peculiar
chivalry, are we then to conclude that their disappearance shows that
chivalry is decaying? By no means. It only means that the hotels are
improving. The truth is that as the typical old-fashioned hotel was
built and conducted in America, with the main entrance opening directly
from the street into the large paved lobby, where men congregated at all
hours of the day to talk politics and to spit, where the porters banged
and trundled luggage, and whither, through the door opening to one side,
came the clamour of the bar-room, it was out of the question that women
should frequent that common entrance. Had a hotel constructed and
managed on the same principles been set down in any English town, women
would have declined to use it at all, nor would Englishmen have
expected their womenfolk to do so. Americans avoided the difficulty by
creating the "ladies' entrance." But it was no evidence of superior
chivalry on the part of the people that, having devised a place not fit
for woman's occupancy and more unpleasant than was to be found in any
other part of the world, they provided (albeit rather inadequate) means
by which women could avoid visiting it.

Once I saw two young English girls--sweet girls, tall and graceful, with
English roses blooming in their cheeks--come down-stairs in the evening,
after dinner, as they might have done in any hotel to which they had
been accustomed in Europe, to the lobby of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New
York. It was a time of some political excitement and there are enough
men living now who remember what the Fifth Avenue Hotel used to be at
such seasons twenty years ago. The girls--it was probably their first
night on American soil and they could not stand being cooped up in their
room upstairs all the evening--ma