Interests outside of medicine claimed some of my time, of which activities in the Working Women’s League, emergency lectures to a Girls’ Friendly Society, and to nurses in one of the city hospitals, membership in a German class, in a Browning club, even in a Plato club, were among the chief. The Browning club, especially, proved intensely interesting--three or four married couples, three spinsters (including myself) and one bashful bachelor. None of us, except Dr. Randolph, knew anything about Browning when we began; the club was not started in the reverential spirit that I fancy most Browning clubs are. At first we ridiculed ourselves and Browning not a little; but if we came to scoff, we remained to pray--or, if we first endured our poet, then pitied ourselves, we ended by embracing Browning. But the last stage was slow in coming; we struggled and puzzled and got entangled; we were helped out by Dr. Randolph, and amused by Mrs. Randolph, who would not stand--only up to a certain point--what she could not understand. She would blurt out, “Oh, mercy! let’s stop this moonshine, and read something we _can_ understand.” And we soon learned that hers was the sensible view--there was so much that was lucid in Browning that we came in time to pity the too-easily discouraged readers who stopped short at the stumbling-blocks. The Plato Club, conducted by the Universalist minister, was an incongruous affair--the clergyman, a young lawyer, a factory girl who wrote poetry, a Vassar graduate, teachers in the seminary, two seamstresses, a choice assortment of “old maids,” and the “girl doctor.” They met at my office. I got very little from Plato as we read it, but the incongruous assembly was a perpetual delight. In a few months it petered out, but the young lawyer and I formed a club of two and read Emerson together Sunday evenings (until he became engaged), and thus cemented a friendship which has grown and strengthened with the years. Another of the Browning Club friendships has also proved of lasting delight. Marion Rockwood, a bachelor-maid who had a studio two floors above me, was a splendid, energetic creature with a glorious soprano voice. Both too occupied to see much of each other, we called a greeting in the morning and at night as we went through the halls. I loved to hear her trilling away up there in her sky-top, as she went about busy with household duties, as I with mine. In the years that followed, reverses and sorrows have come to her, but she has sung on when her heart was heavy; sung to supply losses that would have crushed one less stout of heart. Now a great happiness has come into her life; but whatever of joy or sorrow comes, she will always be the dauntless, inimitable creature I knew in the old Browning Club days.