andid souls they styled great Shakespeare
rot and voted Ibsen and Tolstoi sheer bedlamites at large. While mind
met mind below stairs these honest gentlemen contentedly knocked the
balls about the green, smoked hospitable Joe Hilliard's cigars, and
sampled the choicest liquors of his sideboard. By such diplomacy every
important walk in the town's life came to have its representative in
what in her heart of hearts Mrs. Hilliard called her salon.

The first autumn meeting should have gladdened the hostess. Her house
had never lighted to better advantage; everybody admired the new
decorations; she herself felt no impulse to quarrel either with nature
or her dressmaker; the programme had run with consummate
smoothness,--Volney Sprague, the editor of the _Tuscarora County Whig_,
reading a scholarly paper on Shakespeare's anachronisms, and his fast
friend Bernard Graves leading the discussion in his usual clever way;
furthermore, the ices which had been ordered for this very special
occasion had proved everything that ices should be. Yet Mrs. Hilliard
was dissatisfied.

"The club positively loses a vital something of its individuality when
Mr. Bowers and Mr. Shelby are absent," said she.

Mrs. Bowers, a large placid personage of indefinite waist-line,
remarked that nothing except politics could have dragged her husband
away.

"What a pity that the Hon. Seneca had to miss your anachronisms,
Volney," murmured Bernard Graves, who was a personable young gentleman
of thirty.

"And Shelby," queried the editor, "hasn't that choice spirit your pity
too?"

Mrs. Hilliard caught nothing of their sarcasm save Shelby's name.

"I miss his criticism," she declared. "It's so practical."

The editor fell to polishing his eye-glasses for lack of a reply.

"And so helpful," pursued the lady. "He has the faculty of ending a
tangled discussion with a word."

"The dear man usually changes the subject," muttered the editor
savagely under cover of an amiable platitude put forth by Mrs. Bowers.

"Or fogs it round with one of his Tuscarora yarns," dropped Graves.

The topic apparently knew no bottom for Mrs. Hilliard.

"How he will shine in Congress!" she went on. "Of course he'll get the
nomination?" She referred the query to Sprague.

"Probably." His reply was lukewarm.

"And isn't there news of the convention? You ought to know, who get
straight from the wires what ordinary mortals must wait to read. Has
he won?"

"T