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 ventured:
'So you think that now English women can obtain in London dresses just as pretty as women can in Paris and New York?