r; these at first dazed the woman unused to
clubs. But only for a brief time. Presently, she began to be consulted;
her advice was asked; she made a speech in a meeting of the state
delegation. There was, in the speech, her natural clear sense--which
goes for something always and everywhere--there was, also, the mark in
voice and speech and pose, of her years' training with the teachers. "I
believe you could be heard all right, in the theater," said the
president of the state delegation, afterward, "will you make a motion
or two for us, this afternoon?" She made the motions; and, strangely
enough, she wasn't so frightened as she had been in the state
delegation; in fact, she proposed a simple short cut through an
unnecessary dilemma with not much feeling beyond wonderment that so many
clever women could get themselves into such a tangle. The applause and
delight of her companions of the delegation touched her. "I'm in it,
again," she thought, railing at her own vanity, but curiously pleased.
Now, her thoughts were back, groping through the years when she was not
"in it." Not the days of her youth, not at all; she had been the leader
of her mates, an ingenious, tolerant, easy-going leader, admired and
loved, shining among them by right of two years in an eastern
boarding-school and a trip to Europe.

Not in her early married life, either; although, at first, Darius was
poor and the great wagon manufactory was but a daring experiment. In
those days she knew all her husband's hopes and plans as well as his
troubles. He used to say, often, that she had a good business head.
Those days they lived in a little brown wooden house with a five-foot
piazza; and Darius mowed the tiny lawn himself; and she put up her own
preserves and made all the children's clothes--pretty clothes they were,
too; she was a housewife whose praise was in all the churches. But it
does not follow that she had ceased to be a leader, far from it; she was
the president of the "Ladies' Sewing Society" of her church; and of the
first woman's club, classically named the "Clionian." She was a
progressive spirit; she it was who introduced the regular motion into
the business meetings; before her reign it having been the artless
custom of the societies to talk until the discussion either languished
or grew too violent, when some promoter of harmony would call out, "Let
us put it to vote," whereupon there would be a few timid ayes and a
self-respecting silence i