The meccas of the world Author:Ruth Cranston Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV MISS NEW YORK, JR. There is no woman in modern times of whom so much has been written, so little said, as of the American woman. Essayists have echoed o... more »ne another in pronouncing her the handsomest, the best dressed, the most virtuous, and altogether the most attractive woman the world round. Psychologists have let her carefully alone; she is not a simple problem to expound. She is, however, a most interesting one, and I have not the courage to slight her with the usual cursory remarks on eyes, hair, and figure. She deserves a second and more searching glance. To her own countrymen she is a goddess on a pedestal that never totters; to the foreigner she is a pretty, restless, thoroughly selfish female, who roams the earth at scandalous liberty, while her husband sits at home and posts checks. Naturally, the truth—if one can get at truth regarding such a complex creature—falls between these two conceptions: the American woman is a splendid, faulty human being, in whom the extremes of human weakness and nobility seem surely to have met. She is the product of the extreme Western philosophy of absolute individualism, and as such is constituted a law unto herself, which she defies the world to gainsay. At the same time she knows herself so little that she changes and contradicts this law constantly, thus bewildering those who are trying to understand it and her. For example, we are convinced of her independence. We go with her to the milliner's. She wants a hat with plumes. "Oh, but, my dear" says the saleslady reprovingly, "they aren't wearing plumes this season—they aren't wearing them at all. Everybody is having Paradise feathers." Madame New York instantly declares that in that case she must have Paradise feathers, too, and is thoroughly content when the same are added...« less