those very traits which she knew he disliked.  Yet all the time she had the highest appreciation of his most delicate refinements, while she felt also that he ought to see that at bottom she was just as refined as he, though her outward mask was not so elegant.  I have no doubt whatever that, as Mrs. Winterbourne, she adapted herself to her new milieu with absolute success, and yet without loss of her own most fascinating individuality.[8]

The whole atmosphere of the country tends to preserve the spirit of unsuspecting innocence in the American maiden.  The function of a chaperon is very differently interpreted in the United States and in England.  On one occasion I met in a Pullman car a young lady travelling in charge of her governess.  A chance conversation elicited the fact that she was the daughter of a well-known New York banker; and the fact that we had some mutual acquaintances was accepted as all-sufficing credentials for my respectability.  We had happened to fix on the same hotel at our destination; and in the evening, after dinner, I met in the corridor the staid and severe-looking gouvernante, who saluted me with “Oh, Mr. Muirhead, I have such a headache!  Would you mind going out with my little girl while she makes some purchases?” I was a little taken aback at first; but a moment’s reflection convinced me that I had just experienced a most striking tribute to the honour of the American man and the social atmosphere of the United States.

The psychological method of suggestive criticism has, perhaps, never been applied with more delicacy of intelligence than in M. Bourget’s chapter on the American woman.  Each stroke of the pen, or rather each turn of the scalpel, amazes us by its keen penetration.  As we at last close the book and meditate on what we have read, it is little by little borne in upon us that though due tribute is paid to the charming traits of the American woman, yet the general outcome of M. Bourget’s analysis is truly damnatory.  If this sprightly, fascinating, somewhat hard and calculating young woman be a true picture of the transatlantic maiden, we may sigh indeed for her lack of the Ewig Weibliche.  I do not pretend to say where M. Bourget’s appreciation is at fault, but that it is false—­unaccountably false—­in the general impression it leaves, I have no manner of doubt.  Perhaps his attention has been fixed too exclusively on the Newport girl, who, it must again be insisted on, is too much impregnated with cosmopolitan fin de siecle-ism to be taken as the American type.  Botanise a flower, use the strongest glasses you will, tear apart and name and analyse,—­the result is a catalogue, the flower with its beauty and perfume is not there.  So M. Bourget has catalogued the separate qualities of the American woman; as a whole she has eluded his analysis.  Perhaps this chapter of his may be taken as an eminent illustration of the limitations of the critical method, which is at times so illuminating, while at times it so utterly fails to touch the heart of things, or, better, the wholeness of things.