ck his head and gave vent to the heartiest burst
of laughter he had indulged in for years. "Upon my word, you are
original," he exclaimed, delightedly, "and for heaven's sake, don't
try to be anything else. You could not be an American girl if you
tried for a century, for the reason that you have too many centuries
behind you. The American girl is charming, exquisite, a perfect
flower--but thin. She is like the first fruit of a new tree planted
in new soil. Her flavor is as subtle and vanishing as pistachio,
but there is no richness, no depth, no mellowness, no suggestion
of generations of grafting, or of orchards whose very sites are
forgotten. The soda-water simile is good, but the American girl, in
her actual existence--not in her verbal photographs, I grant you--is
worthy of a better. She is more like one glass of champagne-_frappe_,
momentarily stimulating, but quickly forgotten. When I was in America,
I met the most charming women in New York--I did not spend two weeks,
all told, in Washington--and New York is the concentrated essence,
the pinnacle of American civilization and achievement. But although I
frequently talked to one or another of those women for five hours at a
time without a suggestion of fatigue, I always had the same sensation
in regard to them that I had in regard to their waists while
dancing--they were unsatisfactory, intangible. I never could be sure
I really held a woman in my arms, and I never could remember a word
I had exchanged with them. But they are charming--that word describes
them 'down to the ground.'"

"That word 'thin' is good, too," she replied; "and I think it
describes their literature better than any other. They write
beautifully those Americans, they are witty, they are amusing, they
are entertaining, they delineate character with a master hand; they
give us an exact idea of their peculiar environment and conditions;
and the way they handle dialect is a marvel; but--they are thin; they
ring hollow; they are like sketches in pen-and-ink; there is no color,
no warmth, and above all, no perspective. I don't know that they are
even done in sharp black-and-white; to me the pervading tone is gray.
The American author depresses me; he makes me feel commonplace and new
and unballasted. I always feel as if I were the 'millionth woman in
superfluous herds'; and when one of those terrible American authors
attacks my type, and carves me up for the delectation of the public, I
shall go ba