f Europe as in America, and has quite as
many devoted worshippers there as among us.

Naturally, one of the chief reasons why American women have so great a
liking for European society is to be found in the fact of the far more
important position that married ladies occupy in that society than they
do with us. For a woman who feels that she has still attractions which
should not be buried in obscurity, but who has found that since her
marriage she has, to all intents and purposes, been "laid upon the
shelf," it is a very delightful experience to see herself once more the
object of solicitous attention, considered as one of the brilliant
central ornaments of a ballroom, not as one of its indispensable
wall-decorations. The experience seems to be so particularly pleasant to
the majority of American women, indeed, that they show the greatest
disinclination to sharing it one with the other--a disinclination made
manifest by that habit of reviling each other which I mentioned as the
second great aim and occupation of our countrywomen abroad. That there
should be very little kindness and fellow-feeling, and a great deal of
envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness among their members, is
characteristic of all foreign colonies in every country; but none
certainly can, in this respect, surpass the American colonies in Europe,
at least in so far as their feminine representatives are concerned. The
extent to which these ladies carry their backbiting and slandering, and
the abnormal growth which their jealousy of one another attains, fill
the masculine mind with amazement.

A lady of a certain age who had lived in Europe twenty years, and who,
in addition to being a person of great clearness and robustness of
judgment, held a position, as a widow with a comfortable competency,
which made her verdict unassailable by any suspicion of its being an
interested one, spoke to me once on this subject. "In all my experience
of American life in Europe," she said, "I may safely state that I have
never met more than half a dozen American women who had anything but
ill-natured remarks to make of one another. No American woman need hope,
live as she may, do as she may, say what she may, to escape criticism
at the hands of her countrywomen. The mildest manner in which they will
treat her in conversation will be to say that she is 'nobody,' 'never
goes anywhere,' etc., and thus dismiss her. In every other case it is,
'Mrs. A----? Oh yes, suc