DIFFERENT GIRLS

Harper’s Novelettes

Edited by

William Dean Howells and Henry Mills Alden

Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London

1895, 1896, 1897, 1904, 1905, 1906

Richard Le GALLIENNE
“The little joys of Margaret”

Elizabeth Jordan
“Kittie’s sister Josephine”

Alice brown
“The wizard’s touch”

Charles B. De camp
“The bitter cup”

Mary Applewhite Bacon
“His sister”

Eleanor A. Hallowell
“The perfect year”

William Dean Howells
“Editha”

Octave thanet
“The stout miss Hopkins’s bicycle”

Mary M. Mears
“The marrying of Esther”

Julian Ralph
“Cordelia’s night of romance”

E. A. Alexander
“The prize-fund beneficiary”

Introduction

It is many years now since the American Girl began to engage the consciousness of the American novelist.  Before the expansive period following the Civil War, in the later eighteen-sixties and the earlier eighteen-seventies, she had of course been his heroine, unless he went abroad for one in court circles, or back for one in the feudal ages.  Until the time noted, she had been a heroine and then an American girl.  After that she was an American girl, and then a heroine; and she was often studied against foreign backgrounds, in contrast with other international figures, and her value ascertained in comparison with their valuelessness, though sometimes she was portrayed in those poses of flirtation of which she was born mistress.  Even in these her superiority to all other kinds of girls was insinuated if not asserted.

The young ladies in the present collection are all American girls but one, if we are to suppose Mr. Le Gallienne’s winning type to be of the same English origin as himself.  We can be surer of him than of her, however; but there is no question of the native Americanness of Mrs. Alexander’s girl, who is done so strikingly to the life, with courage to grapple a character and a temperament as uncommon as it is true, which we have rarely found among our fictionists.  Having said this, we must hedge in favor of Miss Jordan’s most autochthonic Miss Kittie, so young a girl as to be still almost a little girl, and with a head full of the ideals of little-girlhood concerning young-girlhood.  The pendant to her pretty picture is the study of