all my boys are girls.'

'Well, Sophia can take care of the Country Club! I remember how we
scoffed when she organized it.'

'It's had precisely the effect I expected. Takes her away from her own
home, where she ought to be----'

'Who wants her at home?'

Unblushingly he answered, '_I_ do.'

'Why, you're never there yourself.' He blinked. 'When you aren't in your
garden you're----'

'Here?' he laughed.

'I don't myself,' she went on, '_I_ don't belong to any clubs----'

'I should hope not, indeed! Where should I go for tea and for news of
the workings of the Zeitgeist?' he mocked.

'But I begin to see what women's clubs are for.'

'They're for the dowdy, unattached females to meet and gossip in, to
hold feeble little debates in, to listen to pettifogging little
lectures, and imagine they're _dans le mouvement_.'

'They are to accustom women to thinking and acting together. While you
and I have been laughing at them, they've been building up a huge
machinery of organization, ready to the hand of the chief engineer who
is to come.'

'Horrible thought!'

'Well, horrible or not, I don't despise clubs any more. They're largely
responsible for the new corporate spirit among women.'

He pulled himself out of the cavernous comfort of his chair, and stood
glooming in front of the screen that hid the fireless grate.

'Clubs, societies, leagues, they're all devices for robbing people of
their freedom. It's no use to talk to me. I'm one of the few
individualists left in the world. I never wanted in my life to belong to
any body.' Her pealing laughter made him explain, smiling, 'To any
corporation, was what I meant.'

'No, no. You got it right the first time! The reason that, in spite of
my late perversities, you don't cast me off is because I'm one of the
few women who don't make claims.'

'It is the claim of the community that I resent. I want to keep clear of
all complication. I want to be really free. I could never have pledged
myself to any Church or any party.'

'Perhaps'--she smiled at him--'perhaps that's why you are a beautiful
and ineffectual angel.'

'The reason I never did is because I care about liberty--the thing
itself. You are in danger, I see, of being enamoured of the name. In
thought women are always half a century or so behind. What patriot's
voice is heard in Europe or America to-day? Where is the modern Kossuth,
Garibaldi? What poet goes out in these times to die at Missolonghi? Just
a