Selina and Maud found themselves more and more thrilled with their work under Mrs. Bruce and Mrs. Higginson.

"It's the virus of content for one thing," said Maud grandly, "we are occupied, and then, too, of course, it's a cause."

There were varying happenings which went with the cause. The business as the days went on, so overcrowded the library, that Aunt Juanita and Selina and the especial medium they worked in, newspaper articles to be compiled, and proofs of circulars from the printers to be corrected, overflowed into the dining-room and onto the dining-table. Mrs. Higginson and Maud in the library folded and directed and stamped all this data in its final form.

Everyone was in earnest and the work engrossing. "You'll stay here to lunch," Aunt Juanita would direct. "There's no time to be wasted going off to hunt food." And the impatience in her voice for any quest so unreasonable and unnecessary as one for food, kept anybody from going.

Nor did conveniences when they were not conveniences carry any weight with her. "No, certainly you can't have the dining-table," she told Hester on an occasion when they all did stay for lunch, and that person, cloth in hand, presented herself to set this piece of furniture for the meal. It was quite as if Hester had asked for something as irregular and preposterous as somebody's nose or ear. "Don't you see Miss Selina and I are using it? That it is piled with our papers? Put the food in dishes and set it around. Why ask me where?" exasperatedly. "Anywhere. We'll help ourselves when we get ready."

And they did, from side-board, window-seat, and mantelpiece, without comment and with equanimity. And be it remarked it was excellent food. And excellently cooked. Trust a Bruce for that! They surprised you by such unexpected characteristics as knowing good food and having it!

Another day Aunt Juanita departed betimes for the printer, leaving the others at their tasks.

"What? What's that, Maud?" from Mrs. Higginson presently, looking about her as she stood up, tying on her bonnet, "Mrs. Bruce told you to get those circulars to the post-office when you finish them? Why there's five hundred of them! That's Juanita Bruce! Go home and get your lunches, both of you, and I'll send the carriage around here for you. It can take you to the office with the circulars, and wherever you'd like to go afterwards. Girls always have a round of calls to pay. Use it for the afternoon."

And the Higginson carriage meant a pair as well and coachman and footman and liveries!

"The greenhouses are going to waste," said this lady another day, "waiting for weather to get the flowers out into the beds. Come back in the carriage to lunch with me, both of you, and let the gardener cut you what you want." And the Higginson house meant pictures brought from abroad, and wonderful rugs, and articles of what Maud once inadvertently called virtue! The clerical force were thrilled and enraptured with their secretarial occupation!

And it would seem, too, that the time was ripe for the cause which Aunt Juanita and Mrs. Higginson were furthering. Selina for proof of this had only to take the cases of her mother and Auntie.

Mail from the outer and impersonal world, coming to either of these two, was so infrequent as to be negligible, their correspondence being altogether personal and intimate. When such mail began to come to both, circulars, and clippings and marked newspapers, despite the fact that their own Selina, or if not she, then Maud, was known to have directed them, they were impressed and fluttered, and put their sewing aside, needles in work, thimbles on sills, read it through with absorption and remark and comment.

"'The Ladies' Library Club of Kalamazoo' is the oldest organization of the kind in the West," Mrs. Wistar would read aloud. "'Four book clubs recently were formed in the State of Pennsylvania.' I'm sure such affairs must be altogether beneficial in communities. We think too little no doubt of the things of the mind. Cultivation along such lines as would be proper in a book club would be stimulating for us all here in our community. Now take Anna, for instance," she referred to Cousin Anna Tomlinson on whom she turned thus testily every now and then, "no matter where she is, or what the occasion, she never wants to talk about anything now but the dishonesty or the appetites of her servants. It's come to be wearing."

"'The Cosmos Club of West Newburyport, Mass.,'" read Auntie whose vocabulary was circumscribed and confined to the familiar, darling soul, and who conceived of cosmos only as pink and white and magenta, grown on bushes and brought in in the fall and put about in vases, "Now I'd like to see something like a cosmos club started here among ourselves. I've always said it was an excellent plan to exchange seeds and cuttings and ideas with other flower lovers."

Juliette Caldwell's pretty mother considered that she'd had a musical training in her day. Hadn't she studied a whole year as a girl at the Conservatory of Music up in Cincinnati? She stopped Selina on the sidewalk to speak about a marked article in a paper sent to her. "It's really wonderful about that B-Sharp Club away out there in a little town in Dakota. I'm so tired when I'm through with the servants, or the no-servants, and the children and the house, I'd be grateful to any incentive which would send me to my piano again."

Cousin Anna Tomlinson came by the Wistars with a circular report of various kinds of Woman's organizations. "The Ladies' Tourist Clubs? Are they parties for travel, Selina? I do get so tired when I go on a trip with your Cousin Willoughby, who won't let me do a thing or see a thing my way."

Selina one day chanced to report these things to her Aunt Juanita and Mrs. Higginson.

"I've known it for some while," assented her aunt. "I've not waited and worked, and worked and waited twelve years for this moment, not to recognize it when it comes. The time is ripe." Aunt Juanita spoke solemnly and as if genuinely moved. "I knew that when Mrs. Higginson and I started upon this local agitation and movement."

"I've studied the situation nearly five years myself," from Mrs. Higginson. "Juanita is right, the time is ripe, and the moment is here!"

It was the crucial moment! Both ladies admitted it! Acknowledged they had foreseen it and made ready for it! And then turned their backs upon it!

Mrs. Bruce met her clerical force of two as they arrived at her door the next morning. It was near the end of May.

"Important as I deem the cause here at home," she told Selina and Maud, "and I hold nothing higher than the arousing of the individual woman, Mrs. Higginson and I are called to Chicago. There's a chance that the demand by women for representation on the commission of the projected world's fair in Chicago is to be turned down. Mrs. Higginson hopes to be appointed one of these women representatives if the demand is granted to use the opportunity to spread her ideas about women among women. I am interested on principle. We go to-day."

Here Mrs. Higginson arrived in her carriage to pick up Mrs. Bruce and her satchel. She got out and came in for a brief conference.

"We had hoped to call on the women here in our own town and induce them to meet and organize this week. We may have to be in Chicago ten days, which will bring it well into June. By that time the various commencements and such are all on, and after them the summer exodus will have begun and the moment will be past. It's most unfortunate."