taking
sorts of entertainments, and the ordinary result is that in one season
she is not only launched and talked about, but securely placed and
greatly admired.

And if you want to know why she does this thing, the answer you can
get, as I did, from her own mouth; she simply "likes London and London
society."

As an amiable, broad-minded woman, she does not love her own country
so much that she cannot find a place in her heart for London, too, and
that which chiefly appeals to her in our elderly, sprawling, sooty,
amusing and splendid old capital is the fact that she finds it
interesting.

There you have one explanation, at least, of the apparent phenomenon
of the ever-growing circle of American women in the very heart of our
biggest city. But it becomes a Londoner to confess that another good
reason why she is so familiar and conspicuous a figure among us is
because we reciprocate her liking with the strongest possible warmth
of admiration.

Not only do we regard our American colony with genuine enthusiasm, and
take pride and pleasure in the fact that it is the largest of its kind
in any European capital, but social London pleasantly feels its
influence.

Now, influence is one of those qualities that the American woman
carries about with her just as naturally as she carries her pretty
airs of independence, or her capacity for easy and amusing speech, and
it is a sad mistake for anyone to take it for granted that on her
wealth or her pulchritude alone all her claim to success and
popularity in England rests.

In no way that I know of has her influence been more sensibly and
beneficially felt among us than in the introduction of a quick,
vivacious tone to conversation.

Her gift for light, easy, semi-humorous talk, her gay, self-confident
way of telling a good story, constitute her a leading and most lasting
attraction in English estimation. From her the English woman has
learned, first, that which it seems every transatlantic sister is
aware by intuition, that one supreme duty of the sex, as it is
represented in society, is to know how to talk a little to everybody,
to talk always in sprightly fashion, and never to adopt the English
woman's depressing method of answering all conversational efforts and
overtures with chilling monosyllables.

It is no exaggeration to say that since the tremendous enlargement of
the American colony, the whole pace of London drawing-room talk has
enormously improved. We Briti