She may appear as maid, wife or widow; sometimes as divorcee; but, personally, she conducts her own campaign. Furthermore, she comes fully equipped to carry everything before her—she has wit, wealth and good looks at her command, and she works along approved and sensible lines of action.
If she has a thoroughgoing conquest of London planned out, she does not put up at a fashionable hotel and spread her fine plumage and wait for notice.
She usually begins by taking a house; she furnishes it with original but discreet good taste; she wears startlingly pretty gowns—quite the best, as a rule, that Paris can supply; she gives the most taking sorts of entertainments, and the ordinary result is that in one season she is not only launched and talked about, but securely placed and greatly admired.
And if you want to know why she does this thing, the answer you can get, as I did, from her own mouth; she simply “likes London and London society.”
As an amiable, broad-minded woman, she does not love her own country so much that she cannot find a place in her heart for London, too, and that which chiefly appeals to her in our elderly, sprawling, sooty, amusing and splendid old capital is the fact that she finds it interesting.
There you have one explanation, at least, of the apparent phenomenon of the ever-growing circle of American women in the very heart of our biggest city. But it becomes a Londoner to confess that another good reason why she is so familiar and conspicuous a figure among us is because we reciprocate her liking with the strongest possible warmth of admiration.
Not only do we regard our American colony with genuine enthusiasm, and take pride and pleasure in the fact that it is the largest of its kind in any European capital, but social London pleasantly feels its influence.
Now, influence is one of those qualities that the American woman carries about with her just as naturally as she carries her pretty airs of independence, or her capacity for easy and amusing speech, and it is a sad mistake for anyone to take it for granted that on her wealth or her pulchritude alone all her claim to success and popularity in England rests.
In no way that I know of has her influence been more sensibly and beneficially felt among us than in the introduction of a quick, vivacious tone to conversation.
Her gift for light, easy, semi-humorous talk, her gay, self-confident way of telling a good story, constitute her a leading and most lasting attraction in English estimation. From her the English woman has learned, first, that which it seems every transatlantic sister is aware by intuition, that one supreme duty of the sex, as it is represented in society, is to know how to talk a little to everybody, to talk always in sprightly fashion, and never to adopt the English woman’s depressing method of answering all conversational efforts and overtures with chilling monosyllables.