That the American mother cares more for real than for apparent authority, explains, to those who know, the visible and so often misleading detachment of the daughter; and the daughter’s sense of a dependence that is not irksome, a suzerainty that is not intrusive, a mother care that has no vanity of assertion, appears in her freer bearing, her finer self-reliance. Whatever her special gifts, meeting her socially always is likely to have the charm associated with the fact that she never is afraid either that she will not rise to the occasion or that she will offend authority. She has not the first fear because she is playing her own game. She has not the second because she does not live in a threatening or too admonitory shadow. You think of these things sometimes when you sit opposite a fan. Her fan! Have you not seen it blot out at the critical moment all that was worth looking at in the world? Have you not realized that it is part of her panoply? Have you not witnessed over and over again the genius which she exhibits in the management of accessories? Have you not heard in the flutter of her fan a note from that orchestra of sounds in which she makes even her silk petticoat play a witching part? [Illustration] With her fan you quite naturally associate those two absolutely unanswerable arguments--an American girl’s eyes. They are different, believe me, these American eyes, from any other sort. The women of no other country can look at you that way. You must admit, and in some degree understand this, or you cannot hope to understand Miss America in society or anywhere else. You may say of her eyes what Darwin hinted of eyes in general, that they are the supreme physical paradox. They do not peer like the virgin eyes of poetical tradition. It has been complained that they have not at all the inquiring look once thought to be so winsome in the young. They seem to _know_, yet they are too feminine to assert. We say hard things about the poets nowadays, but who can blame the poets for becoming emotional over her eyes? Are eyes ever more a mystery, a contradiction, an uncombattable force than when Miss America turns upon us her gentle yet fearless, her wise yet maidenly orbs? We may have planned a battle. We may have girded ourselves for a glance toward these twin guns in that implacable turret, but at the first encounter our bravado withers. When she uses these weapons as she pre-eminently knows how, we declare the motion carried--the eyes have it.