All this point of view is in my friend’s tone of voice and gesture. He has inherited part of his money, and married the rest, and the income pays for a good caretaker. He himself is a physician for the most extensively landed families in central Illinois. He dresses well, so people think he knows all about medicine. He is squarely set, has a heavy jaw, a steadying manner, a kindly disposition, pays the best salaries to his office boy and secretaries and the people who work his farms. He has the greatest aversion to oaths, bad manners, adultery, and has a literary turn. Though he looks like an old prize fighter with a touch of deacon-sleekness, he reads Montaigne, Lord Chesterfield, Thackeray, Shakespeare, and the like. He enjoys discussing in the most sympathetic way every human trait that has to do with purely domestic dramatic and personal emotions. His wife is a valiant Daughter of the American Revolution and his daughter belongs to the most snobbish sorority to be discovered for miles. He has been “right in the wagon” whenever a bit of near royalty has passed through Springfield, and his manner though blunt, was deferential. His wildest turn is for radical painters, and he has the best collection west of the Hudson of the now forgotten cubists. Of far different sort is the next member of our Club. She is of the fine nerved creatures of this world, a spring beauty in whose conversation I take delight. She is a teacher in one of the Springfield ward schools, and a sober little reader of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and we quarrel a bit about that. But her taste there represents her desire for fine grained English whatever the thought conveyed. When Clara Horton takes delight in life, it comes in a flash that sets her friends aflame. The school marm is gone. She ceases to admonish me. The imaginary eyes of her censorious pupils are banished, and I am no longer a pupil, and she is the daughter of a nymph of the most delicate mood and a faun of the gentlest sort. Her whole physical fabric is aglow with the idea of the book or the event or the mere day’s sunshine or tomorrow’s movie. Her skin shows the whiteness of a stock that has been too inbred for many generations for complete vigor, the gentle nymph and the gentle faun met too often, and there were not quite enough bullies or peasants among her far European ancestors. Her people have been for many generations in America. Every line of her family, north and south, has been remembered with the greatest comprehension of every taste and impulse. She gets her silky black hair from one grandmother, and her thousand dimples from another no doubt. She openly hates the complacency of our “first families.” Ideas go pouring through her head, all the time.