With what impressiveness these women utter both these words! which we must not weary of returning to; for they perhaps sum up the entire American soul.  They are bandied about in conversation like two formulae, in which are revealed the persistence of this creature, who, born of a stern race, and feeling herself fine, wills to become finer and ever finer; who, reared amid democratic surroundings, wills to become distinguished and ever more distinguished; who, daughter of a land of enterprise, loves to excite continually in herself the sensation of over-strained nerves.

When you see ten, fifteen, thirty, fifty like this, the character of eccentricity, which you first found in them by comparison with the women of Europe, disappears.  A new type of feminine attractiveness is revealed to you, less affecting than irritating, enigmatic and slightly ambiguous by its indefinable blending of supple grace and virile firmness, by the alliance of culture and vigor, by the most thrilling nervous sensitiveness and the sturdiest health.  The true place of such a creature in this society appears to you also, and the profound reason why these men, themselves all action, leave these women free thus to act with total independence.  If it is permitted to apply an old legal term to creatures so subtle, so delicate, these women are the delegates to luxury in this utilitarian civilization.  Their mission is to bring into it that which the American has not time to create, and which he desires to have:—­the flower of elegance, something of beauty, and in a word, of aristocracy.  They are the nobility in this land of business, a nobility developed by the very development of business; since the money which is made in the offices comes at last to them, and manipulated by their fingers, is transfigured, blossoming into precious decorations, made intellectual in plays of fancy,—­in fact, unutilized.  A great artist, foremost of this epoch by the ardor of his efforts, the conscientiousness of his study, and the sincerity of his vision,—­John Sargent,—­has shown what I have tried to express, in a portrait I saw in an exhibition; that of a woman whose name I do not know.  It is a portrait such as the fifteenth-century masters painted, who back of the individual found the real, and back of the model a whole social order.  The canvas might be called ‘The American Idol,’ so representative is it.

The woman is standing, her feet side by side, her knees close together, in an almost hieratic pose.  Her body, rendered supple by exercise, is sheathed—­you might say molded—­in a tight-fitting black dress.  Rubies, like drops of blood, sparkle on her shoes.  Her slender waist is encircled by a girdle of enormous pearls, and from this dress, which makes an intensely dark background for the stony brilliance of the jewels, the arms and shoulders shine out with another brilliance, that of a flower-like flesh,—­fine, white flesh, through which flows blood perpetually