with a sweet and subtle fragrance of humanity that is, perhaps,
unique. Free from any sense of inherited or conventional superiority
or inferiority, as devoid of the brutality of condescension as of the
meanness of toadyism, she combines in a strangely attractive way the
charm of eternal womanliness with the latest aroma of a progressive
century. It is, doubtless, this quality that M. Bourget has in view
when he speaks of the incomparable delicacy of the American girl, or
M. Paul Blouët when he asserts that "you find in the American woman a
quality which, I fear, is beginning to disappear in Paris and is
almost unknown in London--a kind of spiritualised politeness, a tender
solicitude for other people, combined with strong individuality."

There is one type of girl, with whom even the most modest and most
moderately eligible of bachelors must be familiar in England, who is
seldom in evidence in the United States--she whom the American
aborigines might call the "Girl-Anxious-to-be-Married." What
right-minded man in any circle of British society has not shuddered at
the open pursuit of young Croesus? Have not our novelists and
satirists reaped the most ample harvest from the pitiable spectacle
and all its results? A large part of the advantage that American
society has over English rests in the comparative absence of this
phenomenon. Man there does not and cannot bear himself as the cynosure
of the female eye; the art of throwing the handkerchief has not been
included in his early curriculum. The American dancing man does not
dare to arrive just in time for supper or to lounge in the doorway
while dozens of girls line the walls in faded expectation of a waltz.
The English girl herself can hardly be blamed for this state of
things. She has been brought up to think that marriage is the be-all
and end-all of her existence. "For my part," writes the author of
"Cecil, the Coxcomb," "I never blame them when I see them capering and