Everyone, I repeat, is deeply interested in something.  I am not talking of idiots; there are no such in women’s clubs.  I have been telling some odd stories of clubwomen, in which they are represented as doing and saying idiotic things.  These stories are all true, and if one should take the time to collect and print others, I do not suppose, as the sacred writer says, “that all the world could contain the books that should be written.”  Things quite as idiotic as these that I have reported are said and done in every city and every hamlet of these United States every day in the year and every hour in the day—­except possibly between three and five A.M., and sometimes even then.  Yet those who say and do these things are not idiots.  When your friend Brown is telling you his pet anecdote for the thirty-fifth time, or when Smith insists that you listen to a recital of the uninteresting accomplishments of his newly-arrived infant, you may allow your thoughts to wander and make some inane remark, yet you are not an idiot.  You are simply not interested.  You are using most of your mind in another direction and it is only with what is left of it that you hear Brown or Smith and talk to him.  Brown or Smith is not dealing with your personality as a whole, but with a residuum.

And this is what is the matter with the clubwomen who read foolishly and ask foolish questions in libraries.  They are residual personalities.  Not being at all interested in the matter in hand, they are devoting to it only a minimum part of their brains; and what they do and say is comparable with the act of the perambulating professor, who, absorbed in mathematical calculation, lifted his hat to the cow.

The professor was perhaps pardonable, for his mind was not wandering—­it was suffering, on the contrary, from excessive concentration—­but it was not concentrated on the cow.  In the case of the clubwomen, the role of the cow is played by the papers that they are preparing, while, in lieu of the mathematical problems, we have a variety of really absorbing subjects, more or less important, over which their minds are wandering.  What we must do is to capture these wandering minds, and this we can accomplish only by enlisting their own knowledge of what interests them.

If you would realise the difference between the mental processes of a mere residue and those of the whole personality when its vigour is concentrated on one subject, listen first to one of those perfunctory essays, culled from a collection of cyclopaedias, and then hear a whole woman throw her whole self into something.  Hear her candid opinion of some person or thing that has fallen below her standard!  Hear her able analysis of the case at law between her family and the neighbours!  Hear her make a speech on woman suffrage—­I mean when it is really to her the cause of causes; there are those who take it up for other reasons, as the club-women do their papers, with not dissimilar