her glittering energy and her healthy bloodlessness. Some differences
appear among the sections of the country as to what special phases of
her character shall be here or there preferred: she is ordinarily most
capricious in the Southern, most strenuous in the Western, most knowing
in the New York, and most demure in the New England novels. Yet
everywhere she considerably resembles a bright, cool, graceful boy
pretending to be a woman. Coeducation and the scarcity of chaperons have
made her self-possessed to a degree which mystifies readers not duly
versed in American folkways. Though she plays at love-making almost from
the cradle, she manages hardly ever to be scorched--a salamander, as one
novelist suggests, sporting among the flames of life.

When native Victorianism was at its height, in the third quarter of the
nineteenth century, she inclined to piety as her mode of preservation;
at the present moment she inclines to a romping optimism which frightens
away both thought and passion. From _The Wide, Wide World_ to
_Pollyanna_, however, she has taken habitual advantage of the reverence
for the virgin which is one of the most pervasive elements in American
popular opinion. That reverence has many charming and wholesome aspects;
it has given young women a priceless freedom of movement in America
without the penalty of being constantly suspected of sexual designs
which they may not harbor. It must be remembered that the Daisy Millers
who awaken unjust European gossip are understood at home, and that the
understanding given them is a form of homage certainly no less honorable
than the compliments of gallantry. In actual experience, however, girls
grow up, whereas the popular fiction of the United States has done its
best to keep them forever children. Nothing breaks the crystal shallows
of their confidence. They are insolently secure in a world apparently
made for them. The little difficulties which perturb their courtship are
nine-tenths of them superficial and external matters, and the end comes