The American girl may not be in reality better educated than her British sister, nor a more profound thinker; but her mind is indisputably more agile and elastic.  In fact, a slow-going Britisher has to go through a regular course of training before he can follow the rapid transitions of her train of associations.  She has the happiest faculty in getting at another’s point of view and in putting herself in his place.  Her imagination is more likely to be over-active than too sluggish.  One of the most popular classes of the “Society for the Encouragement of Study at Home” is that devoted to imaginary travels in Europe.  She is wonderfully adaptable, and makes herself at ease in an entirely strange milieu almost before the transition is complete.  Both M. Blouet and M. Bourget notice this, and claim that it is a quality she shares with the Frenchwoman.  The wife of a recent President is a stock illustration of it—­a girl who was transferred in a moment from what we should call a quiet “middle-class” existence to the apex of publicity, and comported herself in the most trying situations with the ease, dignity, unconsciousness, taste, and graciousness of a born princess.

The innocence of the American girl is neither an affectation, nor a prejudiced fable, nor a piece of stupidity.  The German woman, quoted by Mr. Bryce, found her American compeer furchtbar frei, but she had at once to add und furchtbar fromm.  “The innocence of the American girl passes abysses of obscenity without stain or knowledge.”  She may be perfectly able to hold her own under any circumstances, but she has little of that detestable quality which we call “knowing.”  The immortal Daisy Miller is a charming illustration of this.  I used sometimes to get into trouble with American ladies, who “hoped I did not take Daisy Miller as a type of the average American girl,” by assuring them that “I did not—­that I thought her much too good for that.”  And in truth there seemed to me a lack of subtlety in the current appreciation of the charming young lady from Schenectady, who is much finer than many readers give her credit for.  And on this point I think I may cite Mr. Henry James himself as a witness on my side, since, in a dramatic version of the tale published in the Atlantic Monthly (Vol. 51, 1883), he makes his immaculate Bostonian, Mr. Winterbourne, marry Daisy with a full consciousness of all she was and had been.  As I understand her, Miss Daisy Miller, in spite of her somewhat unpropitious early surroundings, was a young woman entirely able to appreciate the very best when she met it.  She at once recognised the superiority of Winterbourne to the men she had hitherto known, and she also recognised that her “style” was not the “style” of him or of his associates.  But she was very young, and had all the unreasonable pride of extreme youth; and so she determined not to alter her behaviour one jot or tittle in order to attract him—­nay, with a sort of bravado, she exaggerated