estored. The ladies gulped
down chicken salad, many of them using forks with black thread tied
about them to show they were borrowed from Mrs. Eubanks. They drank
lemonade from a fine glass pitcher that had come as a gratuitous mark of
esteem from the tea merchant patronized by the hostess; and they
congealed themselves pleasantly with vanilla ice-cream eaten from dishes
of excellent pressed glass that had come one by one as the Robinson
family consumed its baking powder.

But Miss Caroline would have been dense indeed had she not divined, even
amid that informal babbling, that she was being viewed by the ladies of
the Club with a shocked stupefaction.

Precisely what emotion this knowledge left with her I have never known.
But I do know that before the meeting broke up, it had been agreed to
hold the next one at the house of Miss Caroline herself. It may be that
she suggested and urged this in pure desperation, wishing to regain a
favor which she had felt unaccountably withdrawn; and it may be that the
ladies accepted in a similar desperation, knowing not how to inform her
that she was grossly ineligible for membership in a Home Study Club.

The intervening two weeks were filled with tales and talks of Miss
Caroline's heresy. Excitement and adverse criticism were almost
universally aroused. It was a scandal of proportions almost equal to
that of her love for strong drink. About most writers one could be
permitted to have an opinion. But it was not thought that one could
properly have an opinion about Shakspere, and, so far as we knew, no one
had ever before subjected him to this indignity. One might as well have
an opinion about Virtue or the law of gravitation. An opinion of any
sort was impossible. One favorable would be puny, futile, immodestly
patronizing. An unfavorable opinion had heretofore not been within
realms of the idlest speculation.

There were but two of us, I believe, who did not promptly condemn Miss
Caroline's violence of speech--two men of varying parts. Westley Keyts
frankly said he had never been able to "get into" Shakspere, and
considered it, as a book for reading purposes, inferior to "Cudjo's
Cave," which he had read three times. The minister, whose church Miss
Caroline now patronized,--that term being chosen after some
deliberation,--held up both his hands at the news and mildly exclaimed,
"Well!" Then, after a pause, "Well, well!" And still again, after
another pause, "Well, well, well!"