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in certain streets of certain cities, at certain hours of the day, no women walk unattended except such as desire to be insulted, it is probable that other women, who go there in ignorance, will suffer inconvenience. Nor has the difference in local custom any bearing whatever on the respective morality of different localities. These things are arranged differently in different countries; that is all. Moreover, in this particular a great change has come over American cities in late years, nor are all American cities or all English by any means alike. A similar change has come in the matter of "ladies' entrances" to hotels. If the provision of the separate doors was a sign of peculiar chivalry, are we then to conclude that their disappearance shows that chivalry is decaying? By no means. It only means that the hotels are improving. The truth is that as the typical old-fashioned hotel was built and conducted in America, with the main entrance opening directly from the street into the large paved lobby, where men congregated at all hours of the day to talk politics and to spit, where the porters banged and trundled luggage, and whither, through the door opening to one side, came the clamour of the bar-room, it was out of the question that women should frequent that common entrance. Had a hotel constructed and managed on the same principles been set down in any English town, women would have declined to use it at all, nor would Englishmen have expected their womenfolk to do so. Americans avoided the difficulty by creating the "ladies' entrance." But it was no evidence of superior chivalry on the part of the people that, having devised a place not fit for woman's occupancy and more unpleasant than was to be found in any other part of the world, they provided (albeit rather inadequate) means by which women could avoid visiting it. Once I saw two young English girls--sweet girls, tall and graceful, with English roses blooming in their cheeks--come down-stairs in the evening, after dinner, as they might have done in any hotel to which they had been accustomed in Europe, to the lobby of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. It was a time of some political excitement and there are enough men living now who remember what the Fifth Avenue Hotel used to be at such seasons twenty years ago. The girls--it was probably their first night on American soil and they could not stand being cooped up in their room upstairs all the evening--ma
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