bership, to fulfil their club duties, and to act in
general as other women do in other clubs. To go back to our recent simile,
it is precisely the same interest that keeps you listening, or pretending
to listen, to a bore, while you are really thinking of something else. If
you were free to follow your impulses, you would insult the bore, or throw
him downstairs, or retreat precipitately. You are inhibited by your sense
of propriety and your recognition of what is due to a fellow-man, no
matter how boresome he may be. The clubwoman doubtless has a strong
impulse to throw the encyclopaedia out of the window, or to insult the
librarian (occasionally she does) or even to resign from the club. She is
prevented, in like manner, by her sense of propriety, and often, too, we
must admit, by a real, though rudimentary, desire for knowledge. But such
inhibitions cannot develop into judgment. They are merely negative, while
the interest that has a valuable outcome is positive.

Another thing that we shall do well to remember is that no condition or
relation one of whose elements or factors is the human mind can ever be
properly considered apart from that mind. Shakespeare's plays would seem
to be fairly unalterable. Shakespeare is dead and cannot change them, and
they have been written down in black and white this many a year. But the
real play, so far as it makes any difference to us to-day, is not in the
books; or, at least, the book is but one of its elements. It is the effect
produced upon the auditor, and of this a very important element is the
auditor's mental and spiritual state. Considered from this standpoint,
Shakespeare's plays have been changing ever since they were written.
Environment, physical and mental, has altered; the language has developed;
the plain, ordinary talk of Shakespeare's time now seems to us quaint and
odd; every-day allusions have become cryptic. It all "ain't up to date,"
to quote the Cockney's complaint about it. Probably no one to-day can
under any circumstances get the same reaction to a play of Shakespeare as
that of his original audience, and probably no one ever will.

Anecdotes possess a sort of centripetal force; tales illustrative of the
matter at hand have been flying to me from all parts of the country. From
the Pacific Northwest comes this, which seems pertinent just here. A good
clubwoman, who had been slaving all day over a paper on Chaucer, finally
at its close threw down her pen and