The women characters evolved by the school of local color endure a serious restriction from the excessive interest taken by the novelists in the American young girl.  Not only has she as a possible reader established the boundaries beyond which they might not go in speaking of sexual affairs but she has dominated the scene of their inventions with her glittering energy and her healthy bloodlessness.  Some differences appear among the sections of the country as to what special phases of her character shall be here or there preferred:  she is ordinarily most capricious in the Southern, most strenuous in the Western, most knowing in the New York, and most demure in the New England novels.  Yet everywhere she considerably resembles a bright, cool, graceful boy pretending to be a woman.  Coeducation and the scarcity of chaperons have made her self-possessed to a degree which mystifies readers not duly versed in American folkways.  Though she plays at love-making almost from the cradle, she manages hardly ever to be scorched—­a salamander, as one novelist suggests, sporting among the flames of life.

When native Victorianism was at its height, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, she inclined to piety as her mode of preservation; at the present moment she inclines to a romping optimism which frightens away both thought and passion.  From The Wide, Wide World to Pollyanna, however, she has taken habitual advantage of the reverence for the virgin which is one of the most pervasive elements in American popular opinion.  That reverence has many charming and wholesome aspects; it has given young women a priceless freedom of movement in America without the penalty of being constantly suspected of sexual designs which they may not harbor.  It must be remembered that the Daisy Millers who awaken unjust European gossip are understood at home, and that the understanding given them is a form of homage certainly no less honorable than the compliments of gallantry.  In actual experience, however, girls grow up, whereas the popular fiction of the United States has done its best to keep them forever children.  Nothing breaks the crystal shallows of their confidence.  They are insolently secure in a world apparently made for them.  The little difficulties which perturb their courtship are nine-tenths of them superficial and external matters, and the end comes as smoothly as a fairy tale’s, before doubt has ever had an opportunity to shatter or passion the occasion to purge a spirit.  From Hawthorne to the beginnings of naturalism there was hardly a single profound love story written in America.  How could there be when green girls were the sole heroines and censors?