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the emancipated young American girl--practical, positive, passionless,
subtle, and knowing, as you please, either too much or too little. And
yet, as I say, they have a certain stamp, a certain grace; I like to talk
with them, to study them.

The fair New Yorker is, sometimes, very amusing; she asks me if every one
in Boston talks like me--if every one is as "intellectual" as your poor
correspondent. She is for ever throwing Boston up at me; I can't get rid
of Boston. The other one rubs it into me too; but in a different way;
she seems to feel about it as a good Mahommedan feels toward Mecca, and
regards it as a kind of focus of light for the whole human race. Poor
little Boston, what nonsense is talked in thy name! But this New England
maiden is, in her way, a strange type: she is travelling all over Europe
alone--"to see it," she says, "for herself." For herself! What can that
stiff slim self of hers do with such sights, such visions! She looks at
everything, goes everywhere, passes her way, with her clear quiet eyes
wide open; skirting the edge of obscene abysses without suspecting them;
pushing through brambles without tearing her robe; exciting, without
knowing it, the most injurious suspicions; and always holding her course,
passionless, stainless, fearless, charmless! It is a little figure in
which, after all, if you can get the right point of view, there is
something rather striking.

By way of contrast, there is a lovely English girl, with eyes as shy as
violets, and a voice as sweet! She has a sweet Gainsborough head, and a
great Gainsborough hat, with a mighty plume in front of it, which makes a
shadow over her quiet English eyes. Then she has a sage-green robe,
"mystic, wonderful," all embroidered with subtle devices and flowers, and
birds of tender tint; very straight and tight in front, and adorned
behind, along the spine, with large, strange, iridescent buttons. The
revival of taste, of the sense of beauty, in England, interests me
deeply; what is there in a simple row of spinal buttons to make one
dream--to _donnor a rever_, as they say here? I think that a great
aesthetic renascence is at hand, and that a great light will be kindled
in England, for all the world to see. There are spirits there that I
should like to commune with; I think they would understand me.

This gracious English maiden, with her clinging robes, her amulets and
girdles, with something quaint and angular in her ste