AN AUTHOR’S READING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
For some time Sutphen had been in proud possession of a Literary Club, the leading spirit of which organization was the lively and irrepressible wife of the chief banker of the town.
People in Sutphen, including her family, her followers and, last but not least, her husband, never knew what Mrs. Chauncey Stratton was going to do next for the benefit or entertainment of their lives. She rushed them from bazaar to out-door play, from concerts to cooking classes. She and her coterie of womenfolk had descended upon the editor of the principal newspaper, and made him give them one issue of his journal to be edited by them for charity. And about six months before she had instituted a series of fortnightly meetings, at which men and women were to meet for discussion of books and current events. After the president (of course, Mrs. Chauncey Stratton) had accomplished the matter of reading before the assembled club two or three papers embodying her own views of given subjects, and was getting a little tired of it, her friends began dimly to feel that something new would shortly be in order to brighten these occasions—something fresh and metropolitan, fin de siècle, that would carry Sutphen again up on the wave of novelty.
But like all great leaders, Mrs. Chauncey Stratton had malcontents in her camp—close to her person—sharing in her daily councils. The chief complaint made in vulgar parlance by these unsatisfied ones was that they were tired of being bossed.
The matter was under discussion one morning in the cozy library of the secretary of the club, a well-to-do spinster, Miss Cornelia Bennett, whose claim to literary cousinship was based upon substantial grounds. For some years she had been in the habit of sending slips of linen cloth to authors in America and Europe, with the request that they would inscribe thereon their names in pencil. These autographs, duly returned to and “backstitched” in color by Cornelia, were then assembled in a sort of “crazy quilt,” and sold for the benefit of a hospital for incurables. After this signal success in the world of letters, Miss Bennett had been elected without a dissenting voice to be Mrs. Stratton’s second in command. She was a meek, ashen-hued female, who, to all appearance, accepted it as her manifest destiny to walk in Mrs. Stratton’s tracks, never dreaming of such defiance as pushing ahead of her, or crossing her line of march. But, in reality, while engaged in covering for distribution among the members of the club the batch of new books ordered by Mrs. Stratton from New York, a strange spirit of revolt was kindling in her flat chest. Aiding Miss Bennett in her work, sat Mrs. Mark Grindstone, a large, dull, catarrhal lady, chosen to serve as treasurer of their organization—chiefly because she lived in a large, dull house, was sustained by a large, dull husband, and wore to church on Sundays a black velvet cloak bursting with jet beads and bugles at every pore.
Dull as Mrs. Grindstone was, she yet possessed the spirit of the traditional worm. “Of what use is it,” she asked herself, “to wear the handsomest cloak in Sutphen, if one is always to be ordered to the right about by Annetta Stratton?”
And “Why have I been in correspondence with the most prominent brain-workers of two hemispheres,” wondered Cornelia, “if here I am actually afraid to portion out the books before Annetta Stratton comes? If we had only a chance!” she murmured, making common cause with Mrs. Grindstone, “to show her that when called upon for independent action, we can be her equals in success.”