ming and wholesome aspects;
it has given young women a priceless freedom of movement in America
without the penalty of being constantly suspected of sexual designs
which they may not harbor. It must be remembered that the Daisy Millers
who awaken unjust European gossip are understood at home, and that the
understanding given them is a form of homage certainly no less honorable
than the compliments of gallantry. In actual experience, however, girls
grow up, whereas the popular fiction of the United States has done its
best to keep them forever children. Nothing breaks the crystal shallows
of their confidence. They are insolently secure in a world apparently
made for them. The little difficulties which perturb their courtship are
nine-tenths of them superficial and external matters, and the end comes
as smoothly as a fairy tale's, before doubt has ever had an opportunity
to shatter or passion the occasion to purge a spirit. From Hawthorne to
the beginnings of naturalism there was hardly a single profound love
story written in America. How could there be when green girls were the
sole heroines and censors?

Among the older women created by the local color generation there were
certain fashionable successes and social climbers in the large cities
who have more complex fortunes than the young girls; but for the most
part they are merely typical or conventional--as selfish as gold and as
hard as agate. On somewhat humbler levels that generation--as Mary
Austin has pointed out of American fiction at large--came nearer to
reality by its representation of a type peculiar to the United States:
the "woman" who is also a "lady"; that is, who combines in herself the
functions both of the busy housewife and of the charming ornament of her
society. The gradual reduction in America of the servant class has
served to develop women who keep books and music beside them at their
domestic tasks as pioneer farmers kept muskets near them in the fields.
They devote to homely duties the time devoted by European ladies to
love, intrigue, public affairs; they preserve, thanks to countless
labor-saving devices, for more or less intellectual pursuits the
strength which among European women is consumed by habitual drudgery.
The combination of functions has probably done much to increase
sexlessness and to decrease helplessness, and so to produce almost a new
species of womanhood which is bound eventually to be of great moment in
the national life. L