absence of this phenomenon.  Man there does not and cannot bear himself as the cynosure of the female eye; the art of throwing the handkerchief has not been included in his early curriculum.  The American dancing man does not dare to arrive just in time for supper or to lounge in the doorway while dozens of girls line the walls in faded expectation of a waltz.  The English girl herself can hardly be blamed for this state of things.  She has been brought up to think that marriage is the be-all and end-all of her existence.  “For my part,” writes the author of “Cecil, the Coxcomb,” “I never blame them when I see them capering and showing off their little monkey-tricks, for conquest.  The fault is none of theirs.  It is part of an erroneous system.”  Lady Jeune expresses the orthodox English position when she asserts flatly that “to deny that marriage is the object of woman’s existence is absurd.”  The anachronistic survival of the laws of primogeniture and entail practically makes the marriage of the daughter the only alternative for a descent to a lower sphere of society.  In the United States the proportion of girls who strike one as obvious candidates for marriage is remarkably small.  This may be owing to the art with which the American woman conceals her lures, but all the evidence points to its being in the main an entirely natural and unconscious attitude.  The American girl has all along been so accustomed to associate on equal terms with the other sex that she naturally and inevitably regards him more in the light of a comrade than of a possible husband.  She has so many resources, and is so independent, that marriage does not bound her horizon.

Her position, however, is not one of antagonism to marriage.  If it were, I should be the last to commend it.  It rather rests on an assurance of equality, on the assumption that marriage is an honourable estate—­a rounding and completing of existence—­for man as much as for woman.  Nor does it mean, I think, any lack of passion and the deepest instincts of womanhood.  All these are present and can be wakened by the right man at the right time.  Indeed, the very fact that marriage (with or without love) is not incessantly in the foreground of an American girl’s consciousness probably makes the awakening all the more deep and tender because comparatively unanticipated and unforeseen.

The marriages between American heiresses and European peers do not militate seriously against the above view of American marriage.  It cannot be sufficiently emphasised that the doings of a few wealthy people in New York are not characteristic of American civilisation.  The New York Times was entirely right when it said, in commenting upon the frank statement of the bridegroom in a recent alliance of this kind that it had been arranged by friends of both parties:  “A few years ago this frankness would have cost him his bride, if his ‘friends’ had chosen an American girl for that distinction, and even now it would be resented to the point of a rupture of the engagement by most American girls.”