ithout a hat. Thus the fashion
started, and the amazing spectacle was seen the summer following of men
and women of fashion riding and walking for miles without hats. This is
beyond belief, yet it attracted no attention from the common people, who
perhaps got the cast-off hats. Despite this, the Americans are
hard-fisted, shrewd, and as a nation a match for any in the field of
cunning.

I can explain it in no way than by assuming that it is due to
overanxiety to do the correct thing. Their own actors satirize them, one
especially taking them off in a jingle which read, "It's English, quite
English, you know." It is said of the men of the "Four Hundred" that
they turn up their trousers when it rains in London, special reports of
the weather being sent to the clubs for the purpose; but I cannot vouch
for this. I have seen the trousers turned up in all weathers, and found
no one who could explain why he did so. What can you make of so
contradictory a people?

CHAPTER IV

THE AMERICAN WOMAN

The most remarkable feature of America is the women. Divest your mind of
any woman you know in order to prepare yourself to receive my
impressions. To begin with, the American woman ranks with her husband;
indeed, she is his superior in that all men render her homage and
deference. It is accounted a point of chivalry to stand as the defender
of the weaker sex. The American girl is educated with the boys in the
public school, grows up with them, and studies their studies, that she
may be their intellectual equal, and there is a strong party, led by
masculine women, who contend for complete political rights for women.
In some States they vote, and in nearly all may be elected to boards of
various kinds and to minor offices. The Government departments are
filled with women clerks, and all, from the lowest to the highest, are
equal; hence, it is a difficult matter to find a native-born American
who will become a servant. They all aspire to be ladies, and even aliens
become salesladies, cook ladies, laundry ladies. They are on their
dignity, and able to protect it from any point of attack.

The lower classes are particularly uninteresting, for they have no
individuality, and ape the class above them, the result being a cheap,
ludicrous imitation of a lady--an absurd abstraction. The women of the
lower classes who are unmarried work in shops, factories, and
restaurants, often in situations the reverse of sanitary; yet prefer
th