The conditions of life there encourage a girl to undertake what she can do best, with a comparatively healthy disregard of its fancied “respectability.”  Her consciousness of efficiency reacts in a thousand ways; her feet are planted on so solid a foundation that she inevitably seems an important constructive part of society.  The contrast between the American woman and the English woman in this respect may be illustrated by the two Caryatides in the Braccio Nuovo at the Vatican.  The first of these, a copy of one of the figures of the Erechtheum, seems to bear the superincumbent architrave easily and securely, with her feet planted squarely and the main lines running vertically.  In the other, of a later period, the fact that the feet are placed close together gives an air of insecurity to the attitude, an effect heightened by the prevalence of curved lines in the folds of the drapery.

The American woman, too, has had more time than the American man to cultivate the more amiable—­if you will, the more showy—­qualities of American civilisation.  The leisured class of England consists of both sexes, that of America practically of one only.  The problem of the American man so far has mainly been to subdue a new continent to human uses, while the woman has been sacrificing on the altar of the Graces.  Hence the wider culture and the more liberal views are often found in the sex from which the European does not expect them; hence the woman of New York and other American cities is often conspicuously superior to her husband in looks, manners, and general intelligence.  This has been denied by champions of the American man; but the observation of the writer, whatever it may be worth, would deny the denial.

The way in which an expression such as “Ladies’ Cabin” is understood in the United States has always seemed to me very typical of the position of the gentler sex in that country.  In England, when we see an inscription of that kind, we assume that the enclosure referred to is for ladies only.  In America, unless the “only” is emphasized, the “Ladies’ Drawing Room” or the “Ladies’ Waiting Room” extends its hospitality to all those of the male sex who are ready to behave as gentlemen and temporarily forego the delights of tobacco.  Thus half of the male passengers of the United States journey, as it were, under the aegis of woman, and think it no shame to be enclosed in a box labelled with her name.

Put roughly, what chiefly strikes the stranger in the American woman is her candour, her frankness, her hail-fellow-well-met-edness, her apparent absence of consciousness of self or of sex, her spontaneity, her vivacity, her fearlessness.  If the observer himself is not of a specially refined or delicate type, he is apt at first to misunderstand the cameraderie of an American girl, to see in it suggestions of a possible coarseness of fibre.  If a vain man, he may take it as a tribute to his personal charms, or at least to the superior claims of a representative