represented certain phases of
American life as well as the excursion. A great many writers have sought
to classify and label and put into a paragraph a description of the
American girl. She is not to be disposed of by any such easy process.
Undoubtedly she has some common marks of nationality that distinguish her
from the English girl, but in variety she is practically infinite, and
likely to assume almost any form, and the characteristics of a dozen
nationalities. No one type represents her. What, indeed, would one say
of this little group on the hotel piazza, making its comments upon the
excursionists? Here is a young lady of, say, twenty-three years,
inclining already to stoutness, domestic, placid, with matron written on
every line of her unselfish face, capable of being, if necessity were, a
notable housekeeper, learned in preserves and jellies and cordials, sure
to have her closets in order, and a place for every remnant, piece of
twine, and all odds and ends. Not a person to read Browning with, but to
call on if one needed a nurse, or a good dinner, or a charitable deed.
Beside her, in an invalid's chair, a young girl, scarcely eighteen, of
quite another sort, pale, slight, delicate, with a lovely face and large
sentimental eyes, all nerves, the product, perhaps, of a fashionable
school, who in one season in New York, her first, had utterly broken down
into what is called nervous prostration. In striking contrast was Miss
Nettie Sumner, perhaps twenty-one, who corresponded more nearly to what
the internationalists call the American type; had evidently taken school
education as a duck takes water, and danced along in society into
apparent robustness of person and knowledge of the world. A handsome
girl, she would be a comely woman, good-natured, quick at repartee,
confining her knowledge of books to popular novels, too natural and frank
to be a flirt, an adept in all the nice slang current in fashionable
life, caught up from collegians and brokers, accustomed to meet men in
public life, in hotels, a very "jolly" companion, with a fund of good
sense that made her entirely capable of managing her own affairs. Mr.
King was at the moment conversing with still another young lady, who had
more years than the last-named-short, compact figure, round girlish face,
good, strong, dark eyes, modest in bearing, self-possessed in manner,
sensible-who made ready and incisive comments, and seemed to have thought
deeply on a large r