THE DEPOSED AMERICAN GIRL.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIX, Issue 3124, 23 July 1892, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE DEPOSED AMERICAN GIRL.

Has the American girl had her day in England ? The London correspondent of the San Francisco Argonaut thinks she has; and in a recent letter lie seta out some reasons for his belief. The American girl, he says, was popular because she was a novelty, and now that the novelty has worn off, her " defects" are very plainly visible, "It was ever a wonder (we read) how she did get on in EDglish high society ; how she seemed to carry everything before her in that stiff and formal sphere of rulee, regulatious and custons of which she knew nothing, and which it was ever her delight to break. Hardly an English girl but what could have done precisely the same things as (she did, with as much animation, as much independence, and as much grace—if they had been allowed. English girls have just as much animal spirits as American girls—l could not say more—only with them it is bad form to show enthusiasm before folks ; they are certainly as well educated—l will not say better—and they are generally as accomplished as any girls in the civilised world, only it is thought vulgar for them (as it is for any English lady or gentleman) to advertise what they know in any kind of self assertion. To have to stand passively by and see these American girls outshine them at every point simply by doing things they themselves were forbidden to do was, therefore, a trial that no girls so well as English girls could have borne without open rebellion. Day after day the papers announced the marriages of dukes, marquises, earls, lords, and even baronets to their bouncing rivals. Of course it was the dollars that did it. " Bnt," writes this candid friend, "even the heireases seem to have palled upon the English matrimonial palate in high life. There has cot been a marriage of an English lord to an American girl for an age. What is the matter ? Are there no more 'Yankee heiresses'left? Hardly. Yet it cannot be that Englishmen of title have ceaaed to care for money, or ceased to want it when they marry. The only reason 1 can advance is that the American girl hae outlived her novelty in England, and has ceaaed to attract that attention which novelty alone can impart in a sphere already over-crowded with subjects of otherwise equivalent advantages and identical recommendations, who are at the same time intrinsically superior from the fact of being native, and to the manner born."