Like all good and bad things, the American Bounder, whether millionaire or only shabby-genteel, has a certain height beyond which he can no further go--a point where he culminates in a blaze of ultra Bounder-ism. This brilliant apotheosis is triumphantly reached in the Female of his species. The American Female Bounder is the quintessence of vulgarity, and in every way makes herself so objectionable even to her own people and country that Americans themselves view her departure for “Yew-rope” with perfect equanimity, and hope she will never come back. Once in what she calls “the old country” she talks all day long through her quivering nose of “Lady This” and “Countess That.” One of this class I recall now as I write, who spoke openly of a “Mrs. Countess So-and-So”--and utterly declined to be instructed in any other form of address. She was not content to trace her lineage to such humble folk as the “Scroobys of Scrooby”--no indeed, not she! Kings were _her_ ancestors; her “family tree” sprouted from Richard the Lion-Heart, according to her own bombastic assertion, and she, with her loud twanging voice, odious manners and insufferable impertinence, was “genuine stock” of royallest origin. Of course it is quite possible that, as in horticulture, a once nobly cultivated human plant may, if left without wholesome or fostering influences, degenerate into a weed--but that so rank a weed as the American Female Bounder should be the dire result of the Conqueror’s blood is open to honest doubt. She generally has a “mission” to reform something or somebody,--she is very often a “Christian science” woman, or a theosophist. Sometimes she “takes up” Art as though it were a dustpan, and sweeps into it under her “patronage” certain dusty and doubtful literary and musical aspirants who want a “hearing” for their efforts. Fortunately for the world, a “hearing” under the gracious auspices of the American Female Bounder means a silence everywhere else. She is fond of “frocks and frills”--and wears an enormous quantity of jewels, “stones” as she calls them. She “pushes” herself in every possible social direction, and wherever she sees she is not wanted, there, more particularly than elsewhere, she contrives to force an entry. She embraces the game of “Bridge” with passionate eagerness because she sees that by keeping open house, with card-tables always ready, she can attract the loafing “great ones of the earth,” and possibly persuade a “Mrs. Countess” to befriend her. If she is fairly wealthy, she can generally manage to do this. All Mrs. Countesses have not “that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.” Some of them find the American Female Bounder useful--and precisely in the manner she offers herself, even so they take her. And thus it often happens that one frequently meets her where she has no business to be. One is not surprised to find her at Court, or in the Royal enclosure at Ascot, because so many of her