By the grace of nature she is that she is. If the American man continues to pay her the supreme compliment of not understanding her, that is his affair. It always is easier to perceive the other’s folly than our own--especially when the exciting cause is a woman. We know better than the spectator why _we_ permit certain seeming tyrannies! We analyze the American girl in a purely Pickwickian spirit, not because we expect actually to discover facts, but for the immediate pleasure of the speculation. We neither seek nor assume to comprehend this marvellous organism. We know better. When we pretend to delineate the American girl it is in the spirit of Fielding’s aside in “Tom Jones”: “We mention this observation not with any view of pretending to account for so odd a behavior, but lest some critic should hereafter plume himself on discovering it.” [Illustration] [Illustration] II THE TWIG [Illustration] As I said one day to the Professor-- But first I must tell you about the Professor. She is a young woman--young even in an era that classes authors among the “younger writers” until they are sixty, and is pushing the “proper age at which to marry” into the period of severe and undebatable maturity. She is young, but she exemplifies that educated precocity tolerated and fostered by our era. She knows the past like a book and the present like a man. She does not vulgarly bristle with knowledge like the first products of the higher education. Her acquirements sit upon her less like starched linen than like a silken gown that flows with the figure. She is the educated woman in her “second manner,” as the art critics would say. I do not know what the educated woman’s third manner will be. No one acquainted with the charms of the Professor could help hoping that there never would be any.