the audience burst out into the most
sympathetic, spontaneous applause that I have ever heard in a theatre.

_American Clothes_

My impression of the way the American women dressed in 1883 was not
favourable. Some of them wore Indian shawls and diamond ear-rings. They
dressed too grandly in the street and too dowdily in the theatre. All
this has changed. The stores in New York are now the most beautiful in
the world, and the women are dressed to perfection. They are as clever
at the _demi-toilette_ as the Parisian, and the extreme neatness and
smartness of their walking gowns is very refreshing after the floppy,
blowsy, trailing dresses, accompanied by the inevitable feather boa, of
which English girls, who used to be so tidy and "tailor-made," now seem
so fond. The universal white "waist" is so pretty and trim on the
American girl. It is one of the distinguishing marks of a land of the
free, a land where "class" hardly exists. The girl in the store wears
the white waist; so does the rich girl on Fifth Avenue. It costs
anything from seventy-five cents to fifty dollars!

London, when I come back from America, always seems at first like an
ill-lighted village, strangely tame, peaceful, and backward. Above all,
I miss the sunlight of America, and the clear blue skies of an evening.

"Are you glad to get back?" said an English friend.

"Very."

"It's a land of vulgarity, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes, if you mean by that a wonderful land--a land of sunshine and
light, of happiness, of faith in the future!" I answered. I saw no
misery or poverty there. Everyone looked happy. What hurts me on coming
back to England is the _hopeless_ look on so many faces; the dejection
and apathy of the people standing about in the streets. Of course there
is poverty in New York, but not among the Americans. The Italians, the
Russians, the Poles--all the host of immigrants washed in daily across
the harbour--these are poor, but you don't see them unless you go Bowery
ways and even then you can't help feeling that in their sufferings there
is always hope. Vulgarity? I saw little of it. I thought that the people
who had amassed large fortunes used their wealth beautifully. When a man
is rich enough to build himself a big, new house, he remembers some old
house which he once admired, and he has it imitated with all the
technical skill and care that can be had in America. This accounts for
the odd jumble of styles in Fifth Avenue, along the lake