The American girl, as above said, strikes one as individual, as varied.  In England when we meet a girl in a ball-room we can generally—­not always—­“place” her after a few minutes’ talk; she belongs to a set of which you remember to have already met a volume or two.  In some continental countries the patterns in common use seem reduced to three or four.  In the United States every new girl is a new sensation.  Society consists of a series of surprises.  Expectation is continually piqued.  A and B and C do not help you to induce D; when you reach Z you may imagine you find a slight trace of reincarnation.  Not that the surprises are invariably pleasant.  The very force and self-confidence of the American girl doubly and trebly underline the undesirable.  Vulgarity that would be stolid and stodgy in Middlesex becomes blatant and aggressive in New York.

The American girl is not hampered by the feeling of class distinction, which has for her neither religious nor historical sanction.  The English girl is first the squire’s daughter, second a good churchwoman, third an English subject, and fourthly a woman.  Even the best of them cannot rise wholly superior to the all-pervading, and, in its essence, vulgarising, superstition that some of her fellow-creatures are not fit to come between the wind and her nobility.  Those who reject the theory do so by a self-conscious effort which in itself is crude and a strain.  The American girl is, however, born into an atmosphere of unconsciousness of all this, and, unless she belongs to a very narrow coterie, does not reach this point of view either as believer or antagonist.  This endues her, at her best, with a sweet and subtle fragrance of humanity that is, perhaps, unique.  Free from any sense of inherited or conventional superiority or inferiority, as devoid of the brutality of condescension as of the meanness of toadyism, she combines in a strangely attractive way the charm of eternal womanliness with the latest aroma of a progressive century.  It is, doubtless, this quality that M. Bourget has in view when he speaks of the incomparable delicacy of the American girl, or M. Paul Blouet when he asserts that “you find in the American woman a quality which, I fear, is beginning to disappear in Paris and is almost unknown in London—­a kind of spiritualised politeness, a tender solicitude for other people, combined with strong individuality.”

There is one type of girl, with whom even the most modest and most moderately eligible of bachelors must be familiar in England, who is seldom in evidence in the United States—­she whom the American aborigines might call the “Girl-Anxious-to-be-Married.”  What right-minded man in any circle of British society has not shuddered at the open pursuit of young Croesus?  Have not our novelists and satirists reaped the most ample harvest from the pitiable spectacle and all its results?  A large part of the advantage that American society has over English rests in the comparative