But other times, other conditions and other methods. It was a long step from these fine ladies in rouge and ruffles to the earnest American women of high aims and simpler lives who, not far from thirty years ago, began seriously to group themselves in clubs for social fellowship and mental culture. The difference is equally marked, now that these gatherings are numbered by thousands. It is more vital than a variation in manners, as it lies in the character of the two races. The club had no prestige of a class behind it, and concerned itself little with traditions. It was a far more radical departure from the old order than the salon, which, though it established a new social basis, did it through delicate compromises that left the aristocratic spirit intact. It was only in its later days that the iconoclasts invaded it, to some extent, and made it a sort of hotbed for the propagation of democratic theories which seemed quite harmless until, one day, a spark set them ablaze, and the generation that had played with them was swept to destruction. The club was democratic from the foundation. It did not revolve round men of letters, or men of any class. There was no man, or influence of man, behind it--no man in the vista. It does not aim to bring into relief the talents of men, but the talents of women who had come, perhaps, to wish a little glory on their own account. There was no longer an outlet for their activities in the salon, which belonged neither to the genius of the age nor the genius of the race. The Anglo-Saxon man is not preëminently a social being, and though he has not been entirely neglected in the matter of vanity or personal susceptibility, he has rather less of either than his Gallic compeers. Nor is he so amenable, either by temperament or training, to the delicate arts that make social life agreeable. Half a century or so ago, the American, in whose chivalrous regard for women we take so much pride, was in the habit of saying many fine things about them in what he was pleased to call the sphere God had assigned them; indeed, he went so far as to offer a great deal of theoretical incense to them as household divinities, with special and very human limitations as to privileges. But he frowned distinctly upon any intellectual tastes or aspirations. His attitude was tersely and modestly expressed in Tennyson’s couplet: She knows but matters of the house, And he, he knows a thousand things.