CHAP. XIX.

AMERICAN WATCHES.

315

watch factories in America, stated, "I felt at once that the manufacture of watches on the old plan was gone." He considered that American enterprise had made an epoch in the trade, and beaten Europe in one of her oldest and most difficult productions. Certainly the national watch has a claim to be considered "as the true republican heirloom, a triumph of industry in an age of industry, a product of American enterprise, moderate in cost, and accessible to the body of the people."

CHAPTER XX.

The American girl-Oscar Wilde's definition-A group at St. LouisGirl graduates-Other types-The liberty accorded to girls—A collegiate's affronted dignity at the suggestion of a chaperon-English and French restrictions-America the paradise of married women— The deference paid by gentlemen to ladies-A report of a woman's meeting excites a "Tit-for-Tat" policy in a lady reporter-Changed spirit of the press-A skit on a woman's-right lecture contrasted with the dignified utterances of Mrs. Howe, Mrs. Stanton, and Mrs. Livermore-Grace Greenwood on "sufferance". -Queen Victoria as a politician, wife, and mother-Mr. Woodall's Bill.

WHEN Oscar Wilde returned from the United States he gave London the benefit of "his impressions," in a lecture delivered at Prince's Hall, in which he described the American girl as "the most fascinating little despot in the world; an oasis of picturesque unreasonableness in a dreadful desert of common sense."

Doubtless many maidens sat at the feet of the apostle of the sunflower, and yet subjected him to delightful tyrannies while pleading for "a smile of sad perfection" from the "purple-eyed poet." The other day I read a description of the American girl, which called her "champagny-glittering, foamy, bubbly, sweet, dry, tart; in a word, fizzy! She has not the dreamy, magical, murmury loveableness of the Italian, but there is a cosmopolitan combination which makes her a most attractive coquette; a sort of social catechism-full of answer and question."

CHAP. XX.

AMERICAN GIRLS.

317

There are, however, "girls and girls" in America as elsewhere, and perhaps more varieties than even England's representative æsthetic ever dreamt of can be found there. There are girls after the type of Miss Alcott's Joes and Dolly Wards, Bret Harte's Miggles and M'liss, and Mr. James's Daisy Miller. Indeed, I feel more and more bewildered as I try to think which should be taken as strictly typical-save the one

"So frankly free,

So tender and so good to see,
Because she is so sweet."

In that connection my mind reverts to a bevy of fair girls in St. Louis, fresh from that characteristic American institution, "a young lady's lunch," from which parents and guardians had been rigidly excluded. Twenty maidensnone of them "love sick," like Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivans' damsels, if I could judge by their buoyant spirits and ringing laughter-who, unfettered by the restraining presence of any one whose age exceeded their number, had enjoyed a real "elegant time," before they joined the pleasant circle bidden to welcome me at Mrs. Pulsifer's. Visions then arise of girl graduates engrossed in struggles for \ academic honours, with definite plans of "a future career" well mapped up already; others flit before me who appeared only to live for dress and pleasure; whose chief anxiety \ was the preservation of delicate complexions by manifold artifices; whose meat and drink was the poisonous flattery always within the reach of the frivolous and the vain; whose most intellectual exercise was the discussion of dress. trimmings with equally idle blasé female friends, and whose most serious pursuits were flirtations accompanied by a

thousand petty jealousies, mercenary matrimonial ambitions, and dime novel-reading. Then there are the girls who know everything, and talk on all subjects with equal volubility and incorrectness. I saw too the languid specimen, with pallid face and phantom delicacy of outline, who cannot “walk a block” or pass a day without the aid of a rockingchair, and a softly-cushioned sofa, supplemented by an afternoon's repose in her own chamber. There is the straitlaced New England girl, and the wild but good-hearted Western product, endowed with a healthy frame and pulses which beat time to the music of nature, but full of wayward fancies, and given to the use of strange words and phrases. Her existence is one never-ending round of sensational and mental shocks, which keep her in a nervous quiver, and allow no time for any quality save that of energy to develop itself symmetrically. But it did not seem to me that American young ladies are by any means fashioned after the same pattern as certain novelists would have Europeans imagine; nor can they be simply summed up as independent, self-reliant, intelligent, frank, bright, generous, or impulsive beings, who can go anywhere or do anything.

An American girl is happily not yet hampered by the arbitrary red-tape regulation which weighs down the souls of some of her less fortunate European sisters. Pleasant social intercourse with other girls' brothers is not fenced in with French or even English rigorous restrictions. She may receive an "afternoon call" from a gentleman without having gone through, or even thought of, the formality of a definite engagement to marry him. He asks at the door for her not for her mother or chaperon-and she proceeds

CHAP. XX. SOCIAL CUSTOMS CONTRASTED.

319

to the drawing-room for a tête-à-tête in the most natural matter-of-fact way possible. In some circles she still goes out driving or sleighing, or even to the theatre, with the young men of her acquaintance, without getting herself "talked about," or becoming the scandal of the neighbourhood as she would for similar freedoms in Great Britain.

But the well-bred American girl does not act in the outrageous fashion, or enjoy the wild liberty painted in highly-coloured pictures of life across the Atlantic. Gradually European etiquette has obtained a hold in the Great Republic, and in good society the girls of to-day do not go about with even the freedom they exhibited during my first visit ten years ago.

But I had a curious illustration of how such restrictions are sometimes regarded. A frank manly specimen of a New England College man, who was home for a week's vacation, asked his mother, in my presence, for the loan of her brougham, if a certain young lady accompanied him on the following night to the theatre. "I shall not take her," he added with stern dignity, "if she has these new-fangled English notions of needing a chaperon." His mother afterwards explained to me, that he still regarded the necessity of a chaperon as casting a direct suspicion on his behaviour, and resented it accordingly.

Although greater liberty than English girls possess is still accorded in certain American circles in the case of bachelor friends, a girl is not allowed by the unwritten law of society to go out alone with any married gentleman. While staying at the New York Hotel I was much amused at finding a girl, who had gone to the theatre a few nights previously with a young man to whom she had only been