The occasion was a semi-monthly meeting of the Ladies' Home Study and Culture Club, at which Miss Caroline was to be present. There had been a suspension of the Club's meetings while Mrs. Potts was in abeyance, but on this day she was to enter the world again and preside over the meeting as "Madam President," though the ladies sometimes forgot to call her that. The paper read by Mrs. Potts--who was not at all ineffective in her black--was on "The Lake Poets," with a few pointed selections from Wordsworth and others. Whether or not Miss Caroline was rightly impressed by the furniture exhibit was a question not easy to determine. True, she stared at it with something in her eyes beyond a mere perception of its lines; but whether this was the longing passion of an awakened soul or the simple awe of the unenlightened was not to be ascertained at the moment. Testimony as to her enjoyment of the President's paper was more circumstantial. In the midst of this, as the listeners were besought to "dwell a moment on this exquisite delineation of Nature,"--expertly pronounced "Nate-your" by Mrs. Potts,--Miss Caroline turned her head aside as one deeply moved by the poet's magic. But Marcella Eubanks, glancing at that moment into a mirror on the opposite wall,--a mirror in a plush frame on which pansies had been painted,--caught the full and frank exposure of a yawn. It was a thorough yawn. Miss Caroline had surrendered abjectly to it, in the belief--unrecking the mirror--that she could not be detected. The discussion that followed the paper--as was customary at the meetings--proved to be a bit livelier. Each lady said something she had thought up to say, beginning, "Does it not seem--" or "Are we not forced to conclude--" I suspect that Miss Caroline was sleepy. Perhaps she was nettled by the boredom she had been made to endure without just provocation; perhaps the fashionable fumes of varnish had been toxic to her unaccustomed senses. At any rate she now compromised herself regrettably. Mrs. Westley Keyts had been thinking up something to say, something choice that should yet be sufficiently vague not to incriminate her. It had seemed that these requirements would be met if she said, in a tone of easy patronage, "Mr. Wordsworth is certainly a very bright writer of poetry, but as for me--give _me_ Shakspere!" She had thought of saying "the Bard of Avon," a polished phrase coined for his "Compendium" by the ingenious Mr. Gaskell; but, hearing her own voice strangely break the silence, Mrs. Keyts became timid at the last moment and let it go at "Shakspere." "Oh, Shakspere--of _course_!" said most of the ladies at once, and those not quick enough to utter it concertedly looked it almost reprovingly at the speaker. A silence fell, as if every one must have time to recover from this trivial platitude. But it was a silence outrageously shattered by Miss Caroline, who said:-- "O dear! I've always considered Shakspere such an overrated man!"