afternoon parade in the Park, I do not think there was so great an
average of tall young girls as in any fashionable show with us, where
they form the patriciate which our plutocracy has already flowered into.
But there was a far greater average of tall young men than with us;
which may mean that, with the English, nobility is a masculine
distinction.

As for those great department stores with which the question of women
relates itself inevitably, I have cursorily assumed our priority in
them, and the more I think of them, the more I am inclined to believe
myself right. But that is a matter in which women only may be decisive;
the nice psychology involved cannot be convincingly studied by the other
sex. I will venture, again, however, so far into this strange realm as
to say that the subordinate shops did not seem so many or so good in
London as in New York, though when one remembers the two Bond Streets,
and Oxford, and lower Piccadilly, one might feel the absurdity of
claiming superiority for Broadway, or Fourteenth and Twenty-third
streets, or Union and Madison squares, or the parts of Third and Sixth
avenues to which ladies' shopping has spread. After all, perhaps there
is but one London, in this as in some other things.

Among the other things are hardly the restaurants which abound with us,
good, bad, and indifferent. In the affair of public feeding, of the
costliest, as well as the cheapest sorts, we may, with our polyglot
menus, safely challenge the competition of any metropolis in the world,
not to say the universe. It is not only that we make the openest show of
this feeding, and parade it at windows, whereas the English retire it to
curtained depths within, but that, in reality, we transact it
ubiquitously, perpetually. In both London and New York it is exotic for
the most part, or, at least, on the higher levels, and the