had a queer weariness from always seeing herself and her own ideas in them instead of their own. And she was not in the least dictatorial. She would have preferred open, antagonistic originality, but she got a surfeit of clear, mirror-like peace. She was quite sure that they would quote her opinion of Annie Eustace's paper, but that did not please her. Later on she spoke to Annie herself about it. "Haven't you something else written that you can show me?" She had even suggested the possibility, the desirability, of Annie's taking up a literary career, but she had found the girl very evasive, even secretive, and had never broached the subject again. As for Margaret Edes, she had never fairly listened to anything which anybody except herself had written, unless it had afforded matter for discussion, and the display of her own brilliancy. Annie's productions were so modestly conclusive as to apparently afford no standing ground for argument. In her heart, Margaret regarded them as she regarded Annie's personality, with a contempt so indifferent that it was hardly contempt. She proceeded exactly as if Annie had not made such a fervent disclaimer. "The Zenith Club is the one and only thing which lifts Fairbridge, and the women of Fairbridge, above the common herd," said she majestically. "Don't I know it? Oh, Margaret, don't I know it," cried the other with such feverish energy that Margaret regarded her wonderingly. For all her exploiting of the Zenith Club of Fairbridge, she herself, unless she were the main figure at the helm, could realise nothing in it so exceedingly inspiring, but it was otherwise with Annie. It was quite conceivable that had it not been for the Zenith Club, she never would have grown to her full mental height. Annie Eustace had a mind of the sequential order. By subtle processes, unanalysable even by herself, even the record of Miss Bessy Dicky started this mind upon momentous trains of thought. Unquestionably the Zenith Club acted as a fulminate for little Annie Eustace. To others it might seem, during some of the sessions, as a pathetic attempt of village women to raise themselves upon tiptoes enough to peer over their centuries of weedy feminine growth; an attempt which was as futile, and even ridiculous, as an attempt of a cow to fly. But the Zenith Club justified its existence nobly in the result of little Annie Eustace, if in no other, and it, no doubt, justified itself in others. Who can say what that weekly gathering meant to women who otherwise would not move outside their little treadmill of household labour, what uplifting, if seemingly futile grasps at the great outside of life? Let no one underrate the Women's Club until the years have proven its uselessness. "I am so sorry about Lydia Greenway," said Annie, and this time she did not irritate Margaret. "It does seem as if one were simply doomed to failure every time one really made an effort to raise standards," said Margaret.