The consequence is that nowhere, as a rule, does the gulf between the
sexes yawn so wide as in America. One can often observe it in the
brothers and sisters of the same family. And it runs in the opposite
direction from the gulf in Europe. With us, as a rule, the men are
better educated, and more likely to have read and seen and thought
widely, than the women. In America, the men are generally so steeped in
affairs as to be materialised and encysted; they take for the most part
a hard-headed, solid-silver view of everything, and are but little
influenced by abstract conceptions. Their horizon is bounded by the rim
of the dollar. Nay, owing to the eager desire to get a good start by
beginning life early, their education itself is generally cut short at a
younger age than their sisters'; so that, even at the outset, the girls
have often a decided superiority in knowledge and culture. Amanda reads
Paul Bourget and John Oliver Hobbes; she has some slight tincture of
Latin, Greek, and German; while Cyrus knows nothing but English and
arithmetic, the quotations for prime pork and the state of the market
for Futures. Add to this that the women are more sensitive, more
delicate, more naturally refined, as well as unspoilt by the trading
spirit, and you get the real reasons for the marked and, in some ways,
unusual superiority of the American woman.

That, I think, in large part explains the fascination which American
women undoubtedly exercise over a considerable class of European men. In
the European man the American woman often recognises for the first time
the male of her species. Unaccustomed at home to as general a level of
culture and feeling as she finds among the educated gentlemen of Europe,
she likes their society and makes her preference felt by them. Now man
is a vain animal. You are a man yourself, and must recognise at once the
truth of the proposition. As soon as he sees a woman likes him, he