And this is not saying a word about the differentiating fact that this is a big country, and that Miss America in one section is by no means the same as Miss America in another. I do not mean to say that when we meet her in or from Boston we always know her by sight, but when we come to average her in that neighborhood we are able to see clearly enough that her quality is distinctive, that it is different from the quality of Miss America elsewhere--in New York, for example, where, by a trivial tradition, she is supposed to lay less stress upon intellectuality, but where, under whatever guise of habit or manner, you will find that she knows enough and has what she knows sufficiently at her command to make you nervous. Again, the Philadelphia girl upsets your preconceived notions, if you are foolish enough to have these, by being nothing that suggests even remote relationship to the bronze Quaker on the municipal tower. It is the familiar joke that the Boston girl asks what you know, that the New York girl asks what you own, and that the Philadelphia girl asks who your grandfather was. If this amiable satire should have any foundation in fact, I wonder what the Chicago girl is expected to ask. I myself have a theory, not wholly dissociated from experience, that she does not ask anything, being content to know that she, personifying the great traditionless middle west, has been called the hardest riddle of them all. And, as I have said, we must admit that geography has much to do with the case. Does any one deny that climate and history have made the Kentucky girl a being apart--that the Kentucky horses which she has ridden with so much spirit have had their effect in her whole style and personality? Could we fail to look for a distinctive flowering in the verdant slopes beyond the Sierras or amid that intensely American human environment on the plains of Texas? Have you heard the Creole sing? Have you heard the music of the Georgia girl’s talk? Have you ever let a Virginia girl drive you, or danced with Miss Maryland? A southern dance! Perhaps it is inevitable that we should find ourselves thinking of the Continental and early Federal society; of old Georgetown and the powdered heads, and the minuet, and the blinking candles behind the darkey orchestra; of the clinking swords of the young Revolutionary soldiers, and the satin breeches of the foreign lordlings, studying the precocious young republic and the young republic’s daughters: of the quaint gowns Miss America used to wear, and the taunting little caps and head-dresses, reflecting now the whimsies of the Empire, now the furbelows of the Restoration, and always her engagingly different self. Yes, time is working its wizard tricks up and down the land, slowly here and quickly there, now (as it might seem) in a romantic spirit, and again in brusque paradoxical contrast to the thing we expect. [Illustration]