"She says it is a concerted effort on the part of the women's clubs of the District to have some radical changes made in the laws relating to women. This lecture is to call attention to the necessity for such changes." "In other words, the speaker is going to tell the women what their wrongs are. They can't have been very hard hit if they don't know without being told," said Margaret, a little scornfully. The fact that people of all sorts and conditions were taking an interest in the gathering of the evening aroused Margaret's curiosity in regard to it, and it cannot be denied that it inclined her to look upon a woman's meeting with more toleration than she had ever supposed she could feel. As Mrs. Pennybacker had said, they certainly must be in earnest, and earnestness always commands respect even if the zeal it induces is ill-judged. She would try to go with an unbiased mind. But when they entered the hall and she saw a woman speaker on the platform, her inherited conservatism asserted itself. It seemed a bold thing for a woman to do. She felt that she was doing almost a disreputable thing to come here. Her father would not have approved of it, she was sure. He had always felt that home was the woman's kingdom. She could almost hear him now saying: "Queens you must always be; queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow, before the myrtle crown, and the stainless scepter, of womanhood." Even though the speaker was clothed in soft raiment and did not seem at all masculine, she could not rid herself of the feeling that it was not a womanly thing for her to be here on this platform. Ruskin was right when he said: "But alas! you are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest." When Mrs. Greuze began to speak it was in no receptive mood that Margaret listened, but rather in a spirit of impatient criticism. The thing seemed so far apart from life. After a while she found herself wondering with rather a curious interest what the speaker would say next, but with no spark struck between them. Mrs. Greuze was telling of the laws of the District in regard to married women and their property rights, their inability to buy, to sell, and to hold in their own right. Mrs. Pennybacker was listening intently. "That is as true as Gospel!" she whispered in assent to some assertion that struck her as specially forcible. "I've known a hundred cases in Missouri where a woman's property was simply absorbed by her husband when she was married and if she wanted five dollars to give to the missionary cause in after years she had to go to him for it, and he always thought he was making her a present of it!"