of her importance lie behind politics and publicity.

It seems a reasonable assumption that the formation of the American
girl is due to the same large elemental causes that account for
American phenomena generally; and her _relative_ strikingness may be
explained by the reflection that there was more room for these great
forces to work in the case of woman than in the case of man. The
Englishman, for instance, through his contact with public life and
affairs, through his wider experience, through his rubbing shoulders
with more varied types, had already been prepared for the working of
American conditions in a way that his more sheltered womankind had
not been. In the bleaching of the black and the grey, the change will
be the more striking in the former; the recovery of health will be
conspicuous in proportion to the gravity of the disease. America has
meant opportunity for women even more in some ways than for men. The
gap between them has been lessened in proportion as the gap between
the American and the European has widened. The average American woman
is distinctly more different from her average English sister than is
the case with their respective brothers. The training of the English
girl starts from the very beginning on a different basis from that of
the boy; she is taught to restrain her impulses, while his are allowed
much freer scope; the sister is expected to defer to the brother from
the time she can walk or talk. In America this difference of training
is constantly tending to the vanishing point. The American woman has
never learned to play second fiddle. The American girl, as Mr. Henry
James says, is rarely negative; she is either (and usually) a most
charming success or (and exceptionally) a most disastrous failure. The
pathetic army of ineffective spinsters clinging apologetically to the
skirts of gentility is conspicuous by its absence in America. The
conditions of life there encourage a girl to undertake what she can do