In the first place, fashionable young women in St. Louis are quite as gratifying to the eye as women anywhere. In the second place, they have unusual poise. This latter quality is very striking, and it springs, I fancy, from the town's conservatism and solidity. The young girls and young men of the St. Louis social group have grown up together, as have their parents and grandparents before them. They give one the feeling that they are somehow rooted to the place, as no New Yorker is rooted to New York. The social fabric of St. Louis changes little. The old families live in the houses they have always lived in, instead of moving from apartment to apartment every year or two. One does not feel the nervous tug of social and financial straining, of that eternal overreaching which one senses always in New York. One day at luncheon I found myself between two very lovely creatures--neither of them over twenty-two or twenty-three; both of them endowed with the aplomb of older, more experienced, women--who endeared themselves to me by talking critically about the works of Meredith--and Joseph Conrad--and Leonard Merrick. Fancy that! Fancy their being pretty girls yet having worth-while things to say--and about those three men! And when the conversation drifted away from books to the topic which my companion and I call "life stuff," and when I found them adept also in that field, my appreciation of St. Louis became boundless. It just occurs to me that, in publishing the fact that St. Louis girls have brains I may have unintentionally done them an unkindness. Once I asked a young English bachelor to my house for a week-end. "I want you to come this week," I said, "because the prettiest girl I know will be there." "Delighted," he replied. "She's a most unusual girl," I went on, "for, besides being a dream of loveliness, she's clever." "Oh," he said, "if she's clever, let me come some other time. I don't like 'em clever. I like 'em pretty and stupid." CHAPTER XIX HANNIBAL AND MARK TWAIN If black slaves are no longer bought and sold there, if the river trade has dwindled, if the railroad and the factory have come, bringing a larger population with them, if the town now has a hundred-thousand-dollar city hall, a country club, and "fifty-six passenger trains daily," it is, at all events, a pleasure to record the fact that Hannibal, Missouri, retains to-day that look of soft and shambling picturesqueness suitable to an old river town, and essential to the "St. Petersburg" of fiction--the perpetual dwelling place of those immortal boys, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.