we were interested in them ourselves,
though they were a strange savor to our mental palates, yet we would
not read Mrs. Jameson's letter concerning them to the society, nor
advise the study of them.

"I, for one, don't like to take the responsibility of giving the
women of this village such reading," said Flora Clark. "It may be
improving and widening, and it certainly is interesting, and there
are fine things in it, but it does not seem to me that it would be
wise to take it into the society when I consider some of the members.
I would just as soon think of asking them to tea and giving them
nothing but olives and Russian caviare, which, I understand, hardly
anybody likes at first. I never tasted them myself. We know what
the favorite diet of this village is; and as long as we can eat it
ourselves it seems to me it is safer than to try something which
we may like and everybody else starve on, and I guess we haven't
exhausted some of the older, simpler things, and that there is some
nourishment to be gotten out of them yet for all of us. It is better
for us all to eat bread and butter and pie than for two or three of
us to eat the olives and caviare, and the rest to have to sit gnawing
their forks and spoons."

Mrs. Peter Jones, who is sometimes thought of for the president
instead of Flora, bridled a little. "I suppose you think that these
books are above the ladies of this village," said she.

"I don't know as I think they are so much above as too far to one
side," said Flora. "Sometimes it's longitude, and sometimes it's
latitude that separates people. I don't know but we are just as far
from Ibsen and Maeterlinck as they are from us."

Louisa and I thought Flora might be right. At all events, we did not
wish to set ourselves up in opposition to her. We never carried the
books into the society, and we never read Mrs. Jameson's letter about
them, though we did feel somewhat guilty, especially as we reflected
that Flora had never forgotten the affair of the jumbles, and might
possibly have allowed her personal feelings to influence her.

"I should feel very sorry," said Louisa to me, "if we were preventing
the women of this village from improving themselves."

"Well, we can wait until next summer, and let Mrs. Jameson take the
responsibility. I don't want to be the means of breaking up the
society, for one," said I.

However, when Mrs. Jameson finally arrived in June, she seemed to be
on a slightly different