"London's _fine_. But the folks don't all match it. The girls don't. They're just queer. I reckon there's two things they don't know. How to wear their waists, and how to go around with the boys. When I hear an English girl talking to boys, I just have to think she's funny in the head. If Canadian girls were stiff like that, they'd have the dullest time on earth." Her expressionless pale blue eyes had fixed no one, and she had concluded her speech with a little fling that had settled her back in her chair, unconcerned. And in the interval before the ride home, when the men had been driven off, and she was alone with the sisters and saw them relax and yawn, speak in easy casual tones and apostrophise small things, with great gusto, in well-chosen forcible terms, while the men were no doubt also enjoying the same blessed relief, she had felt that the Canadian girl was more right than she knew. Between men and girls, throughout English life there was no exchange, save in the ways of love. Except for those moments when they stood, to each other, for all the world, they never met. And the sense of these sacred moments embarrassed, even while it shaped and beautified, every occasion. Women were its guardians and hostesses. Their guardianship made them hostesses for life. Upon the faces of these girls as they sat about unmasked and pathetically individual, it shed its radiance and, already, its heavy shadows. Yet American girls with their easy regardlessness seemed lacking in depth of feminine consciousness, too much turned towards the surfaces of life, and the men with their awakened understanding and quick serviceableness, by so much the less men. In any case there was not the recognisable difference in personality that was so striking in England, and that seemed in some way, even at one's moments of greatest irritation with the women, to bring all the men under a reproach. Many young American men had faces moulded on the lines of responsible middle-aged German housewives; while some of the quite young girls looked out at life with the sharp shrewd repudiation of cynical elderly bachelors. If it were the building up of a civilisation that had brought the sexes together, for generations, in relations that came in English society only momentarily, at a house-warming or a picnic, would the results remain? Or would there be, in America, later on, a beginning of the English differences, the women moving, more and more heavily veiled and burdened, towards the heart of life and the men getting further and further away from the living centre. Ought men and women to modify each other, each standing as it were, halfway between the centre and the surface, each with a view across the other's territory? Or should they accentuate their natural differences? _Were_ the differences natural?