I believe clubs encourage women to read, and I am sure that expands their ideas and opens their minds. Women’s clubs are certainly an advantage, and though I have been an original member of several, I always float back to my first love, the Albemarle, where our marble halls, once the Palace of the Bishop of Ely, receive both men and women members. I love my own sex. They are the guiding stars of the Universe, and the modern girl tends to make the world much more interesting than it used to be. Youth must spread its wings, and if it is sound youth it will be gently guided by experience. Let the bird fly, or it will fret at the bars of its cage, break its wings, and languish. No one ever profited by the experience of another, any more than any person inherited the learning of an ancestor. Alas and alack, we must acquire both for ourselves. To our mothers and grandmothers, with their sweet but secluded and often sequestered lives, it would have seemed a deed of daring for a woman to lecture the public. Would they have thought it—would our grandfathers rather have held it “ladylike”? It is curious how one acquires a reputation without the least foundation. For instance, I am always being asked to lecture; sometimes it is at a People’s Palace, sometimes before a learned society, or on behalf of various charities, or to address the blind, or deliver educational discourses; and even the famous Major Pond of America once tried to persuade me to go on a lecturing tour in the States. Tempting as his money offer was, I dared not face that vast public. This reputation is a chimera, for I have only lectured a few times in my life; and these occasions have chiefly been at the People’s Palace at Vauxhall, where an audience of two or three thousand persons, paying from one penny to sixpence, eat oranges, smoke pipes, and otherwise enjoy themselves after their manner, while the lecturer is doing his (or her) best to amuse them. To keep these people out of the public-houses and well occupied for an evening seems worth even the pain and nervousness of standing alone on a stage, nearly as big as that of Drury Lane, with footlights before, and a huge white curtain for one’s slides behind.