en they visit us, but with all
the worst frumps and frippery they can find in their wardrobe. The
American women are considerate enough to try and do their best for us,
and we appreciate the compliment. And thus they brighten our theatres,
our promenades, our balls and dinner-parties, our fashionable
restaurants, and Paris, which loves them, could not now do without
them.

CHAPTER XIX

WOMEN WHO WALK BEST

A few weeks ago I was watching the church parade in Hyde Park, London,
between the statue of Achilles and Stanhope Gate, when I met an American
lady of my acquaintance. We walked together for awhile, and then sat
down in order to watch the fashionable crowd more closely.

It is said that, although Americans and Englishmen think a great deal of
one another nowadays, you seldom hear American women praise the women of
England, and more seldom still hear English women say a good word of
American women.

So I was tickled to know what my American lady friend thought of the
crowd that was performing before us, and I asked her to give me her
impressions.

'Well,' she said, 'it is as good as, if not better than, anything that
New York could produce. Possibly on some special occasion Fifth Avenue
might turn out a few lovelier dresses, but the London average is above
the New York average. You see fewer absolute failures here among the
women, while the men are quite unapproachable--surely Londoners are the
best-dressed men in the world.'

'And the New Yorkers the most brand-newly dressed men,' I interrupted.
'But you are right. I like to think that a coat has been worn just more
than once. But please go on.'

'The days when the London girl was really badly dressed are dead and
gone. We have educated her, we Americans, until she has all but reached
our standard. Just think what the London shops were fifteen and even ten
years ago! Something awful! But now I can buy in them everything I want
just as easily as though I were in Paris or New York.

'I don't know whether the supply of pretty dresses and dainty _et
ceteras_ made the demand, or whether it was the other way about, but, at
any rate, there has been a change within the last decade that is almost
a revolution. The London woman of to-day dresses quite as well as her
sister across the Channel or the Atlantic.'

I was getting sadly disappointed, for my lady friend is a critic and a
wit, and I was expecting a few amusing remarks on English women. So I
ventur