“Only to those who do not understand her,” returned the Professor severely. “That women take their clubs too seriously, too improvingly, has been a matter of complaint for a long time. There has been almost a missionary spirit among those who have sought to save our girls from clubs. Some of the missionaries have preached total abstinence among the girls. ‘If you take one club,’ they have said, ‘you will take another. The appetite will grow on you. You pride yourself on your power of resistance now; but after you have taken a club, a dreadful, unappeasable craving will spring up within you, and you will want more. You will not be able to pass a club without wanting it. Even after you have yielded to a morning, afternoon, and evening indulgence, you will find a temptation to take a luncheon club too,--and when you take them with your meals they have a particularly insidious effect. From this it is but a step to a Browning bracer at nine A. M. and a Schopenhauer cocktail just before dinner. Take no clubs at all--especially the subtle, supposed-to-be-innocuous reading club--’” “Look not upon the club when it is read,” I murmured. “‘--for these,’” the Professor continued, with her inimitable chuckle, “‘for these lead surely to more deadly stimulants. Indeed, these are, to those who truly know them, more deadly than many another sort.’ Then there is the more moderate school of missionaries which is for limiting the number of clubs to so many a week, or to cutting them down gradually on the theory that a girl who has been taking clubs right along cannot stop short without peril to her health. By dropping, say, one club a week for a whole season, a girl may, from a repulsive intellectual sot be brought back, by patient nursing, and in due time, to decency and three clubs a week.” “But, Professor,” I said, “they must believe in clubs as a medicine, as a stimulant in the case of a threatening mental chill--” [Illustration] “Don’t be frivolous,” commanded the Professor; “my irony was incidental to the statement that all of this talk about the seriousness of women’s clubs is based on a misapprehension. In outward form the clubs are serious, and the theme, their ostensible _raison d’être_, almost justifies the misapprehension. When you see a batch of women setting in upon civil government, or mediæval pottery, or Sanskrit, or Homer’s hymn to the Dioscuri, or the Heftkhan of Isfendiyar, it is, perhaps, instinctive that the uninformed should jump to the conclusion that these women are serious, though a moment’s thought might suggest a wiser view. If women really took these things seriously they would not survive. The truth is that the French Revolution, and the Rig-Veda, and the Ramayana are all very amusing if you know how to go at them. If the physical culture classes took the exercises as seriously as the teachers I am sure the members would all break down. And it is the same way with the study of cathedrals or street-cleaning.”