Now, many of these clubs meet chiefly at Minnie Mason's--Mrs. Sydney Mason's. She gets them up, and is president: you see, she has more time, because she has no children--the only woman in Babyland who hasn't, and I don't doubt she feels dreadfully about it. She is not strong, and has to lie on the sofa most of the time, and that is another reason why we meet there so often; and then she lives right in the midst of us all, and so close to the road that we can all of us watch our children, when they are out for their airings, very conveniently. Minnie is very kind and sympathetic, and takes such an interest in all our affairs, and if she is somewhat inclined to gossip about them, poor dear, it is very natural, when she has so few of her own to think about. Well, in the autumn before last, Minnie said we must get up a Tolstoi Club; she said the Russians were the coming race, and Tolstoi was their greatest writer, and the most Christian of moralists (at least she had read so), and that everybody was talking about him, and we should be behindhand if we could not. So we turned one of our clubs, which had nothing particular on hand just then, into one; and, besides Tolstoi, we read other Russian novelists, Turgenieff and--that man whose name is so hard to pronounce, who writes all about convicts and--and other criminals. We did not read them all, for they are very long, and we can never get through anything long; but we hired a very nice lady "skimmer," who ran through them, and told us the plots, and all about the authors, and read us bits. I forget a good deal, but I remember she said that Tolstoi was the supreme realist, and that all previous novelists were romancers and idealists, and that he drew life just as it was, and nobody else had ever done anything like it, except indeed the other Russians; and then we discussed. In discussion we are very apt to stray off to other topics, but that day I remember Bessie Milliken saying that the Russians seemed very queer people; she supposed that if every one said these authors were so true to life, they must be, but she had never known such an extraordinary state of things. Just as soon as ever people were married--if they married at all--they seemed wild to make love to some one else, or have some one else make love to them. "They don't seem to do so here," said Fanny Deane. "_We_ certainly do not," said Blanche Livermore. "I think the reason must be that we have no time. I have scarcely time to see anything of my own husband, much less to fall in love with any one else's."