it with violence over people’s knees.  The touch of a real woman’s dress is in itself delicate; but these blows from a harpy’s fins are as loathsome as a snake’s slime.  If there be two of them they talk loudly together, having a theory that modesty has been put out of court by women’s rights.  But, though not modest, the woman I describe is ferocious in her propriety.  She ignores the whole world around her as she sits; with a raised chin and face flattened by affectation, she pretends to declare aloud that she is positively not aware that any man is even near her.  She speaks as though to her, in her womanhood, the neighborhood of men was the same as that of dogs or cats.  They are there, but she does not hear them, see them, or even acknowledge them by any courtesy of motion.  But her own face always gives her the lie.  In her assumption of indifference she displays her nasty consciousness, and in each attempt at a would-be propriety is guilty of an immodesty.  Who does not know the timid retiring face of the young girl who when alone among men unknown to her feels that it becomes her to keep herself secluded?  As many men as there are around her, so many knights has such a one, ready bucklered for her service, should occasion require such services.  Should it not, she passes on unmolested—­but not, as she herself will wrongly think, unheeded.  But as to her of whom I am speaking, we may say that every twist of her body and every tone of her voice is an unsuccessful falsehood.  She looks square at you in the face, and you rise to give her your seat.  You rise from a deference to your own old convictions, and from that courtesy which you have ever paid to a woman’s dress, let it be worn with ever such hideous deformities.  She takes the place from which you have moved without a word or a bow.  She twists herself round, banging your shins with her wires, while her chin is still raised, and her face is still flattened, and she directs her friend’s attention to another seated man, as though that place were also vacant, and necessarily at her disposure.  Perhaps the man opposite has his own ideas about chivalry.  I have seen such a thing, and have rejoiced to see it.

You will meet these women daily, hourly, everywhere in the streets.  Now and again you will find them in society, making themselves even more odious there than elsewhere.  Who they are, whence they come, and why they are so unlike that other race of women of which I have spoken, you will settle for yourself.  Do we not all say of our chance acquaintances, after half an hour’s conversation, nay, after half an hour spent in the same room without conversation, that this woman is a lady, and that that other woman is not?  They jostle each other even among us, but never seem to mix.  They are closely allied; but neither imbues the other with her attributes.  Both shall be equally well born, or both shall be equally ill born; but still it is so.  The contrast exists in England; but in America it is much stronger.  In England women become ladylike or vulgar.  In the States they are either charming or odious.