ry eclipse by taking her seat, and the
gathering no longer frozen into speechlessness by the realization that
there was a motion before the house, rippled out in brook-like fluency.

"I think a card club would be just too grand for anything," gushed
Gladys Wells with an effect of girlishness, quite misleading. "My
cousin in Springfield belongs to a card club, and they have just the
grandest times. Everybody pays ten cents each meeting, and that goes
for the prize. My cousin won a perfectly grand cut-glass butter dish."

"I don't see how parlor gambling would help uplift the community,"
commented Mrs. Richards coldly from the opposite side of the room.

The seemingly inevitable clash was averted by Susan Fitzgerald, who
rose and addressed the chair, a feat of such reckless daring as to
reduce the assembly to instant dumbness.

"Mrs. President, I think a suffrage club is what we need in Clematis
'most of anything. We women have submitted to being downtrodden long
enough, and the only way for us to force men to give us our rights is
to organize and stand shoulder to shoulder. It's time for us to
arise--to arise in our might and defy the oppressor."

Susan subsided, mopping her moist forehead as if her oratorical effort
had occupied an hour, rather than a trifle over thirty seconds.
Gradually the meeting recovered from its temporary paralysis.

"If it's going to be that sort of a club, I'm sure Robert wouldn't
approve of my having anything to do with it," Mrs. Hornblower remarked
with great distinctness, though apparently addressing her remarks to
her right-hand neighbor. "Robert isn't what you'd call a tyrant, but
he believes that a man ought to be master in his own house. If he
thought there was any danger of my getting interested in such subjects,
he'd put his foot right down and that would be the end of it."

The ghost of a titter swept over the gathering. Mrs. Hornblower,
though fond of flaunting her wifely subjection in the faces of her
acquaintances, never failed to get her own way in any domestic crisis
where she had taken the trouble to form a preference. And on the other
hand, poor Susan Fitzgerald, for all her blustering defiance of the
tyrant sex, could in reality be overawed and browbeaten by any male not
yet out of kilts. Before the phantom-like laughter had quite died
away, Mrs. Hornblower added majestically: "But I don't want my opinions
to count too much either way as I may be leaving Clemat