I once met an Englishman in America who quite unconsciously explained to me the vital difference between English and American society.

He was so quiet, so gentlemanly, and so bored, and I had tried my best to say things. At last I cried in despair, "You Englishmen are so hard to entertain!" To which he replied, in slow surprise, "But we don't want to be entertained!" and that is it! And as man moulds the woman, and the woman makes society—therefore the English woman makes the society of which her Englishman approves, just as the American makes a society suitable for her "men folks."

Society is an elusive expression, and the human beings who constitute it are spread out in layers like the chocolate cake of our childhood, and every layer aspires to be the top one with the sugar frosting. In a kingdom the only ones who ever reach that sugar-coated eminence are of course the august reigning family besides a very precious and select few, who must be horribly bored at having reached an altitude where there is no need of further aspiration. After all, it does add a zest to life to triumph over one's dearest friends and snub them. Of course a reigning family has the superlative privilege of snubbing, but they have to take it out in that, for to them is denied the joy of "climbing."

In America we are still in the beginning of things, and society is less complex, though more so than formerly, as the unfortunate result of increasing wealth. There was a golden age in America, when different cities each required of its votaries different qualifications to enable them to enter what is called "Society." In those days, it is pleasant to testify, it was what a man had done, intellectually or morally, that opened to him the iron-bound gates of Boston. You might be shabby and poor, and rattle up to Society in an exceedingly inelegant vehicle called a "herdic" (which shot you out like coal), but you were welcome if you were literary or scientific, musician or philanthropist. Money looked on respectfully at the great and shabby, and was distinctly elbowed into a corner.

Something grips at my heart as I recall those bygone days when, as a very young girl, with a bump of reverence as high as the Himalayas, I sat in the corner of a splendid, shabby Boston drawing-room, and watched the great men and women, whose genius has left its imprint on American history and literature. They talked to each other, like ordinary human beings, and refreshed themselves with cold coffee and heavy cake, which was passed by such of the younger generation as the wonderful hostess could press into service. It is remembering this wonderful hostess that I am impressed by the truth that entertaining is not a fine art, but genius; it is not acquired, it is inborn.

In this shabby old mansion, with its relics of a bygone splendour, I saw for the first time the greatest hostess it has ever been my good fortune to meet. She was neither beautiful, witty, nor young, but she had the subtle quality which made you at once at home in her genial presence; which made you feel that you were the one guest in whom she was interested, and this impression she made on everybody. Such was her magnetism that her spirit inspired every one, at least for the time being; a charming intercourse was the result, a geniality among her guests who, the very next day, in an overwhelming flood of shyness, would cut each other dead.

I have come to the conclusion that it is this abominable shyness which makes human beings so repellent to each other. It is one of the minor martyrdoms of existence resulting in an antagonistic attitude, not so much because one doubts the eligibility of the other, but rather that one doubts one's self. The agony of self-consciousness that surrounds one as with a thin coating of ice, out of which frosty prison one breathes ice. Did the other but know what one suffers!

It is often very difficult to distinguish between shyness and reserve, for one can be reserved without being shy, and one can be shy and in an excess of shyness frightfully unreserved. Though the English are rightly credited with having brought reserve and self-control—those characteristics of the highest civilization as well as the lowest—to the greatest mastery, yet some of their amazing silence and immobility I believe to be shyness. It is a comfort to think so because, when one's vivacious disposition occasionally hurls one against an icy obstacle, it pains.

The English self-control—the result of generations of self-controlled ancestors—makes heroes in the battlefield, but sometimes it also makes of its bravest officers but foolhardy leaders of men. On the other hand, the national pride to suppress emotion retaliates on nature in a perfectly legitimate way; the emotion one suppresses, like all unused functions, ends by weakening, then disappearing. Not that the English are without emotion, but compared to other nationalities, the average Englishman's emotions are not easily stirred. Self-control is a very inspiring quality, but it is not so wonderful when the nature exercising it is tuned to a low key. English supremacy is so great that English self-control is the fashion, but while an Englishman's self-control is the icy covering to a quiet, placid mountain; the control a Frenchman or an Italian assumes is the ice veneering a volcano.

Human nature is, to a certain extent, everywhere the same, and its simple and primal virtues are the same, only modified by race and climate. A man may be panic-stricken in disaster, not through cowardice, but because of uncontrolled imagination. No one will deny the superlative bravery of the French, but it is equally impossible to deny that in panics they sometimes lose their heads. In such circumstances the Frenchman does not show to the same advantage as the Englishman, not because of a lack of bravery, but because he possesses a fiery imagination. A Frenchman sees not only the present disaster, but he sees the results far into the dim future; the Englishman, with controlled imagination, if any, applies himself to a hurried view of the situation, and wastes no time on a thought of the future.

I knew an American of English descent who found himself in a burning German theatre one night. In the instant there was a panic, and a frantic woman clung to his arms and implored him to save her. He was very near-sighted, and in the confusion his eyeglasses had fallen off. "I certainly will," he said, reassuringly, "if you will just let me put on my glasses." Then he climbed upon the seat, calmly gauged a possible chance of escape, and rescued his companion and himself. Yet the imagination which in certain circumstances results in disaster, under others gives a man a charm which makes his companionship a delight.

We Americans are a composite race; we have the coolness of the English, as well as the nervous tension of multiples of races, exaggerated by that glowing air, which has been wittily called "free champagne." The warring of these various elements promises results that cannot be foreseen in a nation which boasts of being Anglo-Saxon, whatever that may mean.

Years ago I remember the wrecking of a little pleasure boat near a famous island on the coast of Maine, and with what heroism the young men of the party saved themselves; that is where the foreign element brought with it a too active imagination. Now the atmosphere and the foreign element in our blood make us a nervous, high-strung people, aggressively entertaining, and clamouring to be entertained.

In no way has the American invasion proved more triumphant than in the subtle change it is producing in the new generation of English girls. The English woman, like the clever antagonist she is, studies the skilful weapons with which the other has established her captivating supremacy, and is proceeding to use the same.

The new English girl has a charm and a vivacity, when she is not hampered by tradition, which must make the American girl look to her laurels. It will, of course, take her some time to let her spirit sparkle behind those statuesque features; still, she is undoubtedly on the road to vivacity. But the unbending and expressionless matron and immovable and monosyllabic young girl are still to the fore. A wintry smile on the matron's lips, enough to chill the most cordial guest, and the strangled remarks of the young girl and her slow, cold eyes, are the triumphant results of the nation of the self-controlled. Those cold eyes and that slow smile that have in them not the ghost of humour. To get behind the eyes and the smile, to discover some inward fire! Is there any? One looks with envy at those faces which, from the lowest up, possess that in common that it is impossible to penetrate into the real self.

It must be confessed that what might be called the national manner is not conducive to geniality of intercourse.

The power a hostess has to blight a crowd of people with her own frost! There is the hostess who greets you as if she had never seen you before, and accepts your hand as if it were a slice of cold fish; there is the haughty hostess who shakes hands limply while she looks over your head at a superior guest; there is the vague hostess who smiles liberally, but sees you not; then there is the hostess with the surface geniality, who, with a hurried glance at you, gushes inquiries across you at the nearest man. There are as many varieties of hostesses as there are women, and they one and all drop you, and you merge into the army of starers, sometimes saved by an introduction to some other shipwrecked mariner with whom you escape to the tea-room.

The American fashion of dispensing afternoon tea is very pretty, and should be introduced here. Instead of leaving the serving of light refreshments to the servants, the American hostess chooses several of the prettiest girls she knows, and gives them the task of pouring out the tea, coffee, and chocolate at a centre table decorated with flowers, lighted candles, and all that coquettish art of which the American woman is past-mistress. The table should accommodate four girls, who, in their smartest party toilettes, are at once ornamental and useful, and the centre of attraction. They take away something of the stiffness which is inevitable among a crowd of people, many of whom are strangers to each other. Having to ask for a cup of tea from a pretty girl instead of a servant is pleasant, and generally leads to conversation, and it is considered the greatest compliment a hostess can confer if she asks you to "pour" for her. The more original the hostess, the more charming can she make her "teas," and what is usually a rather dreary function may be made entertaining and graceful.

The English hostess, ignoring her pretty chance, leaves the tea-table, if there are many guests, to her servants. I once invited an English girl to "pour" tea for me, and she discomfited me exceedingly by asking why I did not get the servants to do it! And I had meant to pay her a compliment!

What a social comfort a hat is! It gives one so much moral courage. It is less terrible to encounter society in a hat; one can take refuge in it from the coldest blast. But in the evening, garlanded with roses and deserted, so to speak, by God and man, society is a trial.

There is no greater martyrdom for the middle-aged than baring their shoulders to the bitter air and transporting them to an evening function. To shiver for an instant in the smile of the hostess, and then subside against the wall, while the young and ardent flirt about with members of the other sex; or if they don't flirt, they appear to, which is just as well. A very beautiful woman once confessed to me in a moment of sincerity that she would be ashamed to be seen talking to another woman at an evening party. "I would rather be with the most idiotic man, and look as if I were flirting hard, than talk to the most brilliant woman in the room. I always avoid women at parties."

It is not an age for conversation; our small-talk is soon exhausted, and for a woman to talk at length, labels her as a rock to be avoided. How can we have salons, we who cannot converse? We are the products of the daily papers, and our conversation is like their familiar small-talk column. So we have to have artificial aids to entertaining.

We are recited to, sung to, played to, and there being nothing so "cussed" as human nature, no sooner are we played to and recited to than our "cussedness" will out, and we are seized with a wild longing to talk, and talk we do at the top of our voices. Universal resentment is expressed towards the blameless arts that temporarily check our interchange of what it would be flattery to call ideas, but, in my own experience, when some stray man and I have stood together speechless, no sooner did the piano break into our appalling silence than ideas seemed to inundate us. The dumb man spoke as if by magic, and I, who hitherto had nothing to say, couldn't talk fast enough.

The divine arts are too good to be wasted in a twentieth century drawing-room! Such conversation as there is, is amply accompanied by the pianola and the gramophone. These two awful inventions are to music what the chromo is to painting. They make music as vulgar as machine-made lace.

My first experience of the pianola was at the Universal Provider's. It was Christmas time, and I was so tired and harassed that I stood quite still in the surging crowd, oblivious of the sharp elbows of my shopping sisters, oblivious of dust and microbes, only conscious that I was dizzy with fatigue. Suddenly through the crowd I heard the familiar strains of the great romantic polonaise of Chopin—the one introduced by the exquisite Andante Spianato. It is a mediÆval romance without words, of chivalry, tournaments, gallant cavaliers, and beautiful women; all this I heard in the piano department of the Universal Provider.

I couldn't understand it! What great artist could so far forget himself as to play this divine work for a passing, heedless, irritable crowd. I pushed my way past my sisters, and possibly used my elbows. As I came nearer I grew confused by something exasperatingly perfect in the sound. The humanity of a single false note was wanting. I reached the crowd about the piano—well, everybody has seen a pianola! An imitation artist (he had long fair hair) steered the music and pumped in the expression at the proper place, while the indefatigable instrument ejected miles of punctured paper.

Never did anything so get on my nerves! I nearly wept. It is, perhaps, needless to say that the pianola and other instruments of its kind are of American origin, and, like all American inventions, they are labour-saving. You can be a Paderewski while you wait, but, thank Heaven! no ingenious American has yet invented a mechanical Joachim!

The first modest invention, the grandparent of the pianola, was exhibited in Boston (America) years and years ago, and was a modest little box, with only a small appetite for punctured paper. One of the judges of the musical instruments at the exhibition showed me this curious music-box, to which, because of its ingenuity, they had decided to give a prize. Now the instrument has waxed greater and greater, and no one is safe from it, no, not if you go to the farthest desert or highest mountain. It graces afternoon teas, while the guests refresh themselves in stunned silence, or shriek at the top of their voices in vain rivalry, until they melt into the street, where the turmoil of cabs, carts, vans, and motors is soothing and peaceful by comparison.

For a stranger to penetrate into typical English social circles is often a blighting experience. If the hostess is a woman of the world, she comes to your assistance; but if she is the woman of an island, you find yourself stranded, unintroduced, and surrounded by more or less handsome and statuesque creatures, who would possibly be delighted to talk to you if you were introduced—or possibly not.

Oh, the debatable question of introduction! One sometimes thinks that in England people go into society just to avoid each other; at least so it would appear from the ardent way in which they decline to be introduced. Conventional smart English society does not introduce, and that sets the fashion.

Society knows too many people, and refuses to know more; and its young men, having at their command only two feet apiece, also refuse to be introduced, for they cannot extend the field of their activities. The young man's toil consists largely in duty dances, for the only way he can pay a worried mother for a dinner-party is by dancing with her daughter, who still hangs fire. So his path is not always strewn with roses. Still his is easier than the "gal's," for he can decline to be introduced to her, and he does this often with the little caprices and insolence of a society belle.

"Do let me introduce you to my cousin," said a generous young soul to her partner, "she is such a nice 'gal.'"

"Please don't; I should have to dance with her, and I am full up," replied the youth, and so it is. Not that all girls are so generous, far from it. It is the exception when they overstep the bounds and introduce an attractive girl to a young man. The result is that society is made up of cliques, wheels within wheels, and the cliques keep rigidly to themselves, and the loveliest young creatures outside languish against the wall, and no one takes pity on them.

Many are the complicated stratagems to introduce the young girl into the "smart set" of English society, and if the commander-in-chief ("mother") is not blessed with the best steel-covered nerves, she had better not undertake it. The commander-in-chief, of course a rich and great lady, borrows a list of unknown young men from other hostesses and invites them to her ball. Presumably grateful youths pay for this entertainment by dancing with the "gal," but not always.

After all, smart society is alike all over the world; like hotel cooking, it has no nationality. So America is ceasing to introduce, but this repression is not universal yet. All do not yet languish under self-inflicted boredom. A perfect American hostess makes her guests known to each other if they are strangers, and though fashion may protest, this is after all the only way to make a crowd of mutually unknown people comfortable and not awkward. People, except those of great ease of manner, will not speak to each other unless introduced, and to talk to some one without the faint guide-post of a name is not very interesting. You may be talking to a very dull stranger, and turn away bored, when, had you but known that he was a great and shining light, how interested you would have been, and how deftly you would have turned the conversation into the one channel the great one always loves—himself.

Possibly Americans overdo the introducing; they are rather apt to overdo everything; it is the fault of a high-strung, nervous temperament; but of two evils let me rather be torn away from an interesting conversation every few minutes by a vivacious hostess, than be stranded in a corner looking blankly at my fellow man, for all the world as if I had strayed into a 'bus in a party gown. Blessed will the day be when the American invasion will temper English society with its own possibly rather effusive geniality.

The fundamental difference between the two nationalities is that Americans love strangers, and the English hate them. The Englishman looks with suspicion on any one he doesn't know, root and branch; the American loves him until he hears of something to his disadvantage, or until he gets tired of him—which happens.

The Englishman's aversion to strangers does not include the American, curiously enough. He does not call him a foreigner, and he likes him. He likes him partly because he really can't help it, and partly out of policy, and he looks charitably at his curious and original ways just as a big dog watches the gambols of a frolicsome puppy. He always remembers that that puppy is his puppy, and that some day he will grow into a big dog of his own breed, and—well, he respects the breed.

Not that the American man is in England as popular as the American woman; he is not. The charming American woman is the product of generations of hard-working fathers and husbands who have toiled for her, and toil for her, and the result is that in cultivation and attraction she has left her creator rather behind. When you add to this his strenuous habits of business life, in which "devil take the hindmost" is the motto, and a very confident belief in his own ability, and his country's unmistakable destiny to "whip the universe," it produces a rather aggressive personality. So he is not as popular as his charming women, because, also, he represents a prophecy which is not unlike a menace. Yet the big dog watches the gambols of the little dog with tolerant good-nature.

Another factor in favour of the American woman is that she can be charming on two continents—the Englishwoman still confines her efforts to one—and she can be charming in the language of the two greatest nations in the world. Is this not a magnificent opportunity for her social genius? Descended, usually, from all sorts of races, America makes her what she is, and then boastfully sends the perfected article across the water to the old countries to ally herself with the best or the worst of their aristocracy. That it is rarely the case of King Cophetua and the beggar-maid one admits; but, after all, everything has its price in this world, and coronets come dear, except, of course, to that one privileged class—the ladies of the variety theatres.

In speaking of the American man's aggressiveness, one does not wish to imply that the Englishman is not aggressive; far from it. There is no one so aggressive as an Englishman, but the difference is that the American is boastfully aggressive, and the Englishman quietly so, as one so sure of himself and his belongings that boasting is superfluous; which makes him all the more aggravating. The summit and climax of this aggravation is that the Englishman does not know that he is aggressive, and even resents it in his beloved Americans, and never suspects that his own want of popularity may be due to that same cause.

Years ago it was the Englishman who was the spoilt darling of nations; now he is making way for the American. But his early prestige was immense—it is still great, but it is a tempered greatness.

In those days when he went to America to harvest dollars (he rarely went for any other reason), he was received with a rapturous humility which was pathetic. We grovelled before him, we suffered his peculiar manners, which had they been our own we should sometimes have labelled as bad, as the eccentricities of a superior being. We were flattered when our resemblance to him was pointed out, and to increase it we created that particularly obnoxious type, the Anglicised American; for, like all imitations, it is the caricature of the most unpleasant features of a resemblance.

In those days we took him to our hearts, to our homes, and to our clubs, and when sometimes we came to London to enjoy his return civilities, we had to be satisfied with very modest crumbs of entertainment indeed. But perhaps the Englishman said, in the subtle French tongue, "Je paye de ma personne." That explains it.

We spoiled the errant Englishman most abominably; our idol got bad manners and a swelled head, and it always took him some time on his return to a nation that, after all, consists of Englishmen, to find his level again. The wife of a very distinguished man complained to me of the demoralised condition in which her husband—who had gone to America to lecture—had been sent back to her. "It will take me years to unspoil him," she cried. "It's all the fault of your women, who flatter them to death! And that is the reason," she added, with some bitterness, "that Englishmen think they are so charming and clever."

Now that the Englishman has ceased to be so rare a bird in America, we receive him with less tumultuous rejoicing, and yet we still spoil him if he is distinguished or has a title. As for money, it is no object to us as credentials—we leave that to the English. A title? Oh, yes, we love a title! Why shouldn't we? Does not the Englishman, according to Thackeray, love a lord? With all it represents of tradition, romance, and history, is it a more ignoble passion for the snob than the worship of dollars, or more fatal to republican principles?

The American money-kings are as surely creating a class apart as ever did the English possessors of titles, and there is no greater nobility in a duke, by the grace of a gamble on the stock exchange, than a duke by the grace of tradition or history. Both may be represented by very poor creatures, but the duke of history has, at all events, the traditions of his ancestry to excuse the interest he still excites.

Occasionally one hears of an aspiring American, who, captivated by the poetry of sound, buys himself a title, and ornaments his republican breast with decorations—the fitting reward of dollars and cents; but such a one has lost, if not his country, at least his sense of humour.

Still, it is not our republican money-dukes who will make or mar our nation; its stability rests on something nobler. Nor will it turn a great republic finally into a kingdom that we like titles as a child an unaccustomed toy. Is it not dinned into our ears that we are rich, and that the best is not too good for us? Is not the best in the world for us?

"The finest jewels are kept for the American market," a famous jeweller once told me. Are not the very best imitations of the old masters sold to us? We are willing to pay, and money in this world can buy everything except just one trifle—contentment. Apart from contentment, money buys everything. It is a credential for virtue and a good name. A millionaire must be good, or Divine Providence would not so have prospered him, and for this all-sufficient reason London takes him to its innocent and gushing heart. Of course sometimes the millionaire is not a real millionaire, but no one knows until he is found out; but the next best thing to being a real, honourable millionaire, is to have unlimited credit. Blessed is the man who has credit, for some day he may promote a company that will enable him to pay his bills.

Yes, America is being rewarded for all the entertainments she has lavished on bygone Englishmen. She cannot these days complain of a lack of English hospitality. Columbia has a "real good time," and she drops the almighty dollar as she goes on her triumphant way, to the rapture of the English shopkeeper.

She worships English history, English titles, and English cathedrals. She gushes over all things great and good, and often she props up a rickety aristocrat with the splendid strength of her great gold dollars, and not the stiffest British matron dares sniff at her. She will introduce and she will entertain, and she will be entertaining. She is often beautiful, and generally clever,—even if frothily clever.

Of all the American invasion she is the most subtly dangerous. You may keep off the American men with your fleets, and all the terrors of your newest million pounders, but how defend yourself from the American girl, who borrows a bow and arrow from a naughty little boy lightly dressed in two wings and a blush, and shoots right into your—heart!