killed me, but I did it, and I learned a valuable lesson. I hated the
American girl, but I felt as if I had been boiled in soda-water and
every pore of my body had absorbed it. I felt ecstatically frivolous,
and commonplace, and flashing, and sizzling. And--I assure you this
is a fact, although you may not give me credit for such grim
determination and concentration of purpose--but I never eat my
breakfast before I have read an entire chapter from one of those two
authors, it adjusts my mental tone for the day and keeps me in proper
condition."

Dartmouth threw back 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