A few weeks ago I was watching the church parade in Hyde Park, London, between the statue of Achilles and Stanhope Gate, when I met an American lady of my acquaintance. We walked together for awhile, and then sat down in order to watch the fashionable crowd more closely.

It is said that, although Americans and Englishmen think a great deal of one another nowadays, you seldom hear American women praise the women of England, and more seldom still hear English women say a good word of American women.

So I was tickled to know what my American lady friend thought of the crowd that was performing before us, and I asked her to give me her impressions.

'Well,' she said, 'it is as good as, if not better than, anything that New York could produce. Possibly on some special occasion Fifth Avenue might turn out a few lovelier dresses, but the London average is above the New York average. You see fewer absolute failures here among the women, while the men are quite unapproachable—surely Londoners are the best-dressed men in the world.'

'And the New Yorkers the most brand-newly dressed men,' I interrupted. 'But you are right. I like to think that a coat has been worn just more than once. But please go on.'

'The days when the London girl was really badly dressed are dead and gone. We have educated her, we Americans, until she has all but reached our standard. Just think what the London shops were fifteen and even ten years ago! Something awful! But now I can buy in them everything I want just as easily as though I were in Paris or New York.

'I don't know whether the supply of pretty dresses and dainty et ceteras made the demand, or whether it was the other way about, but, at any rate, there has been a change within the last decade that is almost a revolution. The London woman of to-day dresses quite as well as her sister across the Channel or the Atlantic.'

I was getting sadly disappointed, for my lady friend is a critic and a wit, and I was expecting a few amusing remarks on English women. So I ventured:

'So you think that now English women can obtain in London dresses just as pretty as women can in Paris and New York?

'Certainly,' she replied. 'Yet they never look so well, because, you see, when they get these pretty dresses, these poor English women don't know how to put them on. The English girl's education is not yet completed. She has not learned how to carry herself as we have in America, both at home and at school. You know the splendid air and prima donna effects that American women can bring off when they choose. These young English women have hardly a suspicion of them.

'In taste for the delicate things of dress the Londoner is now just about where she should be; but she has not yet learned how to wear a dress. A French woman or an American would make fifty per cent, more of it than the English woman knows how to do; and if this is to be remedied, English girls will first have to be taught how to walk and how to hold themselves.'

And no doubt my American friend had hit on the national defect of English women—their bad way of walking and holding themselves.

One's thoughts naturally fly to Spain, where every member of the feminine sex, from the little girl of four to the old woman, who in England would be bent and tottering, knows how to carry herself as if she were a queen.

If it is true that this result is achieved by the Spanish custom of carrying everything on the head instead of on the back or in the hand, it is a pity the English do not make their girls begin at once to carry their school-satchels in a way that will make them hold their heads up instead of down, and accentuate gracefully their lines both behind and in front.

When I was in South Africa I invariably admired the manner in which the Kaffir and Zulu women walked and held themselves. On watching them I often exclaimed: 'If English women could only walk and carry themselves as these women do, with their pretty faces and figures, with their beautiful skin and complexion, they would have few rivals in the world.'

It is by walking barefooted and carrying everything on their heads that the women of Kaffirland and Zululand learn to walk so well, to hold their heads up, to bring their chests forward, to throw back their shoulders, and give to their gait that gentle swing which is so dainty and graceful.

American women obtain the same result by being drilled at school, for it is incontestable, and, I believe, incontested, that they are the best walking women, and also those who, with the Parisiennes, know best how to put on their dresses.