On Saturday morning Julia attended the meeting of a club in which the problems of business women were reviewed. The members gathered in a hotel auditorium where musicales were sometimes given. The long windows of the room opened above an alleyway and its gold rococo gloom was relieved of the obscure sunshine by electric lights. The women sat in little groups here and there, only half filling the place, and the murmur of voices went on indistinguishably until the president, Mrs. Hurst, a pale self-confident little woman with a whimsical smile, stepped to the platform, below the garlanded reliefs of Beethoven and Mozart, and struck her gavel on the desk. Then an unfinished silence crept over the scattered assemblage. A stout intellectual-looking Jewess came forward ponderously, adjusted her nose glasses, and read the minutes of the previous meeting, while those before her listened with forced attention, or frankly considered the interesting design of green and black embroidery which ornamented her dark blue dress. But once the subjects of the day were under discussion the concentration of the audience was natural and intense. Then the president, with demure severity, rapped with her gavel and reminded too ardent debaters that they were out of order. Julia could not resist the sense of importance that it gave her to state her serious opinion upon certain problems which affected her sex. When she rose to express herself her exposition was so succinct that she was invited to the platform where what she said could be better appreciated. The repetition of her speech was uncomfortably self-conscious. Her cheeks grew faintly pink. There were several women in the audience whom she disliked, and when she talked in this manner she felt that she was beating them down with her righteousness. She observed in the faces of many a virtuous and deliberate stupidity that was a part of their determination not to understand her. Her speech intoxicated her a little. When she stepped to the floor amidst small volleys of applause, the room about her grew slightly dim. For an hour the discussion went on, back and forth, one woman rising and the next interrupting her statement. After Julia herself had spoken, nothing further seemed to her of consequence. The other women were hopelessly verbose, or, if they argued against her, ridiculously unseeing. Their past applause rang irritatingly in her mind. She recalled Dudley Allen's contempt for this feeble utilitarian consideration of eternal things. She was proud of comprehending the unmorality--the moral cynicism--of art. She felt that her broad capacity for understanding men like Dudley Allen liberated her from the narrow ethical confines of the lives that surrounded her, which took their color from social usage.