It is impossible to tell yet what form this feminine reserve and retirement will take.  It is not at all likely to go so far as the Oriental seclusion of women.  The American Girl would never even seemingly give up her right of initiative.  If she is to stay in the background and pretend to surrender her choice to her parents, and with it all the delights of a matrimonial campaign, she will still maintain a position of observation.  If she seems to be influenced at present by the French and Italian examples, we may be sure that she is too intelligent and too fond of freedom to long tolerate any system of chaperonage that she cannot control.  She will find a way to modify the traditional conventionalities so as not to fetter her own free spirit.  It may be her mission to show the world a social order free from the forward independence and smartness of which she has been accused, and yet relieved of the dull stiffness of the older forms.  It is enough now to notice that a change is going on, due to the effect of foreign society upon American women, and to express the patriotic belief that whatever forms of etiquette she may bow to, the American Girl will still be on earth the last and best gift of God to man.

REPOSE IN ACTIVITY

What we want is repose.  We take infinite trouble and go to the ends of the world to get it.  That is what makes us all so restless.  If we could only find a spot where we could sit down, content to let the world go by, away from the Sunday newspapers and the chronicles of an uneasy society, we think we should be happy.  Perhaps such a place is Coronado Beach —­that semi-tropical flower-garden by the sea.  Perhaps another is the Timeo Terrace at Taormina.  There, without moving, one has the most exquisite sea and shore far below him, so far that he has the feeling of domination without effort; the most picturesque crags and castle peaks; he has all classic legend under his eye without the trouble of reading, and mediaeval romance as well; ruins from the time of Theocritus to Freeman, with no responsibility of describing them; and one of the loveliest and most majestic of snow mountains, never twice the same in light and shade, entirely revealed and satisfactory from base to summit, with no self or otherwise imposed duty of climbing it.  Here are most of the elements of peace and calm spirit.  And the town itself is quite dead, utterly exhausted after a turbulent struggle of twenty-five hundred years, its poor inhabitants living along only from habit.  The only new things in it—­the two caravansaries of the traveler—­are a hotel and a cemetery.  One might end his days here in serene retrospection, and more cheaply than in other places of fewer attractions, for it is all Past and no Future.  Probably, therefore, it would not suit the American, whose imagination does not work so easily backward as forward, and who prefers to build his own nest rather than settle in anybody