best, with a comparatively healthy disregard of its fancied
"respectability." Her consciousness of efficiency reacts in a thousand
ways; her feet are planted on so solid a foundation that she
inevitably seems an important constructive part of society. The
contrast between the American woman and the English woman in this
respect may be illustrated by the two Caryatides in the Braccio Nuovo
at the Vatican. The first of these, a copy of one of the figures of
the Erechtheum, seems to bear the superincumbent architrave easily and
securely, with her feet planted squarely and the main lines running
vertically. In the other, of a later period, the fact that the feet
are placed close together gives an air of insecurity to the attitude,
an effect heightened by the prevalence of curved lines in the folds of
the drapery.

The American woman, too, has had more time than the American man to
cultivate the more amiable--if you will, the more showy--qualities of
American civilisation. The leisured class of England consists of both
sexes, that of America practically of one only. The problem of the
American man so far has mainly been to subdue a new continent to human
uses, while the woman has been sacrificing on the altar of the Graces.
Hence the wider culture and the more liberal views are often found in
the sex from which the European does not expect them; hence the woman
of New York and other American cities is often conspicuously superior
to her husband in looks, manners, and general intelligence. This has
been denied by champions of the American man; but the observation of
the writer, whatever it may be worth, would deny the denial.

The way in which an expression such as "Ladies' Cabin" is understood
in the United States has always seemed to me very typical of the
position of the gentler sex in that country. In England, when we see