"Please don't; I should have to dance with her, and I am full up," replied the youth, and so it is. Not that all girls are so generous, far from it. It is the exception when they overstep the bounds and introduce an attractive girl to a young man. The result is that society is made up of cliques, wheels within wheels, and the cliques keep rigidly to themselves, and the loveliest young creatures outside languish against the wall, and no one takes pity on them.
Many are the complicated stratagems to introduce the young girl into the "smart set" of English society, and if the commander-in-chief ("mother") is not blessed with the best steel-covered nerves, she had better not undertake it. The commander-in-chief, of course a rich and great lady, borrows a list of unknown young men from other hostesses and invites them to her ball. Presumably grateful youths pay for this entertainment by dancing with the "gal," but not always.
After all, smart society is alike all over the world; like hotel cooking, it has no nationality. So America is ceasing to introduce, but this repression is not universal yet. All do not yet languish under self-inflicted boredom. A perfect American hostess makes her guests known to each other if they are strangers, and though fashion may protest, this is after all the only way to make a crowd of mutually unknown people comfortable and not awkward. People, except those of great ease of manner, will not speak to each other unless introduced, and to talk to some one without the faint guide-post of a name is not very interesting. You may be talking to a very dull stranger, and turn away bored, when, had you but known that he was a great and shining light, how interested you would have been, and how deftly you would have turned the conversation into the one channel the great one always loves—himself.
Possibly Americans overdo the introducing; they are rather apt to overdo everything; it is the fault of a high-strung, nervous temperament; but of two evils let me rather be torn away from an interesting conversation every few minutes by a vivacious hostess, than be stranded in a corner looking blankly at my fellow man, for all the world as if I had strayed into a 'bus in a party gown. Blessed will the day be when the American invasion will temper English society with its own possibly rather effusive geniality.
The fundamental difference between the two nationalities is that Americans love strangers, and the English hate them. The Englishman looks with suspicion on any one he doesn't know, root and branch; the American loves him until he hears of something to his disadvantage, or until he gets tired of him—which happens.
The Englishman's aversion to strangers does not include the American, curiously enough. He does not call him a foreigner, and he likes him. He likes him partly because he really can't help it, and partly out of policy, and he looks charitably at his curious and original ways just as a big dog watches the gambols of a frolicsome puppy. He always remembers that that puppy is his puppy, and that some day he will grow into a big dog of his own breed, and—well, he respects the breed.
Not that the American man is in England as popular as the American woman; he is not. The charming American woman is the product of generations of hard-working fathers and husbands who have toiled for her, and toil for her, and the result is that in cultivation and attraction she has left her creator rather behind. When you add to this his strenuous habits of business life, in which "devil take the hindmost" is the motto, and a very confident belief in his own ability, and his country's unmistakable destiny to "whip the universe," it produces a rather aggressive personality. So he is not as popular as his charming women, because, also, he represents a prophecy which is not unlike a menace. Yet the big dog watches the gambols of the little dog with tolerant good-nature.
Another factor in favour of the American woman is that she can be charming on two continents—the Englishwoman still confines her efforts to one—and she can be charming in the language of the two greatest nations in the world. Is this not a magnificent opportunity for her social genius? Descended, usually, from all sorts of races, America makes her what she is, and then boastfully sends the perfected article across the water to the old countries to ally herself with the best or the worst of their aristocracy. That it is rarely the case of King Cophetua and the beggar-maid one admits; but, after all, everything has its price in this world, and coronets come dear, except, of course, to that one privileged class—the ladies of the variety theatres.
In speaking of the American man's aggressiveness, one does not wish to imply that the Englishman is not aggressive; far from it. There is no one so aggressive as an Englishman, but the difference is that the American is boastfully aggressive, and the Englishman quietly so, as one so sure of himself and his belongings that boasting is superfluous; which makes him all the more aggravating. The summit and climax of this aggravation is that the Englishman does not know that he is aggressive, and even resents it in his beloved Americans, and never suspects that his own want of popularity may be due to that same cause.
Years ago it was the Englishman who was the spoilt darling of nations; now he is making way for the American. But his early prestige was immense—it is still great, but it is a tempered greatness.