nconventionality. They are now moving, not in the direction of
innocent frivolity, but in that of greater independence. The time is
soon coming when French girls will cease to regard marriage as a sort
of emancipation, and will perhaps look upon it, as an American lady
novelist of my acquaintance does, as a rather hard way of making a
living.

Those French girls will not lose their charms by the enjoyment of
greater liberty and independence. The American women have thus improved
theirs.

CHAPTER XXIX

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN WOMEN HAVE NO LOVE TO SPARE FOR ONE ANOTHER

England and America are two branches of a family who once
quarrelled--For their common interests they may make it up, but
there will never be any love lost--There are no such quarrels to
patch up as family ones.

I have heard a great deal about 'our kith and kin,' 'our cousins across
the Atlantic,' 'blood is thicker than water,' 'the Anglo-Saxon race,'
'the English-speaking people,' 'the Anglo-American alliance,' and other
more or less venerable platitudes with which music-hall managers in
England have for some time succeeded in bringing down the gallery, on
Saturday nights especially. I have heard all that, and, in company with
most Americans, I have laughed in my sleeve.

During their war with Spain, the Americans were grateful for English
sympathy and moral support.

During the Transvaal War, the English, finding themselves isolated and
blamed by the whole of Europe, hoped for American sympathy.

'I scratched your back, you scratch mine.'

This sympathy the English did not obtain, or, if they did, in a very
small measure, and only among the inhabitants of Fifth Avenue and the
'Four Hundred' of a few large Eastern cities. I was in America for
three months at the beginning of last year, and everywhere, from New
York to New Orleans, I found ninety-nine Americans out of every hundred
sympathizing with the Boers in their plucky and determined struggle for
liberty and independence. Their skill and bravery appealed to a nation
who, some hundred years ago, themselves fought successfully for their
freedom.

Yet, as I had many times the opportunity of telling American audiences,
'In the Anglo-Boer struggle, it is not the Boers, but the English who
are fighting for what your ancestors fought for so successfully during
the War of Independence--the liberty of the citizen and good and honest
government. I have sympathy for the Boers