This was thought to be shifty and evasive--certainly not so outspoken as
the town had a right to expect.

Solon Denney, though in his heart true to Shakspere, affected to be
gleeful. A paragraph, mysterious to many, including Miss Caroline,
appeared in the ensuing _Argus_:--

"An encounter long supposed by scientists to be a mere metaphysical
abstraction of almost playful import has at last occurred in sober
physics. The irresistible force has met up with the immovable body. We
look for results next week."

I knew that Solon considered Miss Caroline to be an irresistible force.
I was uncertain whether Shakspere or Mrs. Potts was meant by the
immovable body. I knew that he held them in equal awe, and I knew that
Mrs. Potts felt, in a way, responsible for Shakspere this far west of
Boston, regarding any attack upon him as a personal affront to herself.

On the day of the next meeting the ladies of the Club gathered in the
dingy and inelegant drawing-room of Miss Caroline. No vividly flowered
carpet decked the floor; only a time-toned rug that left the outer edge
of the floor untidily exposing its dull stain; no gilt and onyx table
bore its sculptured fantasy by the busy Rogers. The mantel and shelves
were bare of those fixed ornaments that should decorate the waste places
of all true homes; there were no flint arrow-heads, no "specimens," no
varnished pine cones, no "Rock of Ages," no waxen lilies, not even a
china cup goldenly emblazoned with "Love the Giver," in German script.
And there were no beautiful chairs with delicate gilded spindles--not an
elegant and impracticable chair in the whole big room--not one chair
which could not be occupied as comfortably as any common kitchen rocker.
It was indeed a poor place; obviously the woman's best room, yet showing
careless traces of almost daily use. To ladies who never opened their
best rooms save to dust and air them on days when company was expected,
and who would as soon have lounged in them informally as they would have
desecrated a church, this laxity was heinous.

And ordinarily, in the best rooms of one another, the ladies became
spontaneously, rigidly formal as they assembled, speaking in tones
suitably stiff of the day's paper, or viewing with hushed esteem those
art treasures that surrounded them.

But so difficult was it to attain this formality amid the homely
surroundings of Miss Caroline that to-day they not only lounged with
negligent ease in the big