which you are very likely to shake hands with him with the florin in your
hand, which you have been furtively trying to transfer to the left hand
from the right, and very often the guest drops the wretched coin in his
efforts to give it unseen. It is to be hoped that the ladies of Holland
will succeed in abolishing a custom which is disagreeable alike to
entertainer and entertained.

The women of the upper middle class are certainly much better educated
than their English sisters. They always can speak another language than
their own, and very often two, French and English now being common, while
a few add German and a little Italian, but most of them read German, if
they do not speak it. French is universal, however, for the French novel
is far more to the taste than the more sober English book. The number and
quality of these French books read by the Dutch young lady are enough to
astonish and probably shock an English girl, who reads often with
difficulty the safe 'Daudet' ('Sapho' excepted), but the young Dutchwoman
knows of no _Index Expurgatorius,_ and reads what she likes. At the same
time the classics of England and Germany are very generally read and
valued, and many a Dutchwoman could pass a better examination on the text
and meaning of Shakespeare than the English-woman, whose knowledge is too
often limited to memories of the Cambridge texts of the great poets used
in schools.

But, well educated as the Dutchwoman undoubtedly is, there is nothing
about her of the 'blue-stocking,' and she does not impress you as being
clever until a long acquaintance has brought out her many-sided knowledge.
The great pity is that her education leads to so little, for there are
very few channels into which a Dutchwoman can direct her knowledge.
Politics turn for the most part on differences in religions questions,
which are abstruse and dry to the feminine mind, and of practical