sive cast, and chatty
special correspondence flavored with personal allusion. She was one of
the pioneers in modern society journalism, which at this time, however,
was comparatively veiled and delicate in its methods. Besides, she was a
woman of tireless energy, with theories on many subjects and an ardor
for organization. She advocated prohibition, the free suffrage of woman,
the renunciation of corsets, and was interested in reforms relating to
labor, the pauper classes and the public schools. In behalf of any of
these causes she was ready from time to time to dash off an article at
short notice or address an audience. But her dearest concern was the
promotion of woman's culture and the enlargement of woman's sphere of
usefulness through the club. The idea of the woman's club, which was
taking root over the country, had put in the shade for the time being
all her other plans, including the scheme of a society for making the
golden-rod the national flower. As the founder and president of the
Benham Institute, she felt that she had found an avocation peculiarly
adapted to her capacities, and she was already actively in
correspondence with clubs of a similar character in other cities, in the
hope of forming a national organization for mutual enlightenment and
support.

Mrs. Earle received Selma by invitation at her lodgings the following
day, and so quickly did their friendship ripen that at the end of two
hours each had told the other everything. Selma was prone instinctively
to regard as aristocratic and un-American any limitations to confidence.
The evident disposition on the part of Mrs. Earle to expose promptly and
without reserve the facts of her past and her plans for the future
seemed to Selma typical of an interesting character, and she was
thankful to make a clean breast in her turn as far as was possible. Mrs.
Earle's domestic experience had been thorny.

"I had a home once, too," she said, "a happy home, I thought. My husband
said he loved me. But almost from the first we had trouble. It went on
so from month to month, and finally we agreed to part. He objected, my
dear, to my living my own life. He didn't like me to take an interest in
things outside the house--public matters. I was elected on the
school-board--the only woman--and he ought to have been proud. He said
he was, at first, but he was too fond of declaring that a woman's place
is in her kitchen. One day I said to him, 'Ellery, this can't go on.