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!”

The silence grew more intense, only Mrs. Potts emitting a slight but audible gasp.  But swift looks flashed from each lady to her horrified sisters.  Was it possible that the unfortunate woman had been in no condition to come among them?

“Oh, a greatly overrated man!” repeated Miss Caroline, terribly, “far too wordy—­too fond of wretched puns—­so much of his humor coarse and tiresome.  By the way, have you ladies taken up Byron?”

The moment was charged, almost to explosion.  A crisis impended, out of the very speechlessness of the gathering.  Mrs. Potts was aghast in behalf of William Shakspere, and Marcella Eubanks was crimsoning at the blunt query about Byron, well knowing that he could be taken up by a lady only with the wariest caution, and that he would much better be let alone.  The others were torn demoralizingly between these two extremes of distress.

But the situation was saved by the ready wit of Mrs. Judge Robinson.

“I think the hour has come for refreshments, Madam President!” she said urbanely, and the meeting was nervously adjourned.  Under the animation thus induced an approximate equilibrium was restored.  The ladies gulped down chicken salad, many of them using forks with black thread tied about them to show they were borrowed from Mrs. Eubanks.  They drank lemonade from a fine glass pitcher that had come as a gratuitous mark of esteem from the tea merchant patronized by the hostess; and they congealed themselves pleasantly with vanilla ice-cream eaten from dishes of excellent pressed glass that had come one by one as the Robinson family consumed its baking powder.

But Miss Caroline would have been dense indeed had she not divined, even amid that informal babbling, that she was being viewed by the ladies of the Club with a shocked stupefaction.