In every State of the Union there are women’s clubs of every kind and grade; social, political, sports, professional; some housed in enormous and perfect buildings constructed for them, and some perhaps in only a room or two.

When the pioneer women’s club of New York was started, a club that aspired to be in the same class as the most important men’s club, various governors of the latter were unflatteringly outspoken; women could not possibly run a club as it should be run—­it was unthinkable that they should be foolish enough to attempt it!  And the husbands and fathers of the founders expected to have to dig down in their pockets to make up the deficit; forgetting entirely that the running of a club is merely the running of a house on a large scale, and that women, not men, are the perfect housekeepers.  To-day, no clubs anywhere are more perfect in appointment or better run than the representative women’s clubs.  In fact, some of the men’s clubs have been forced to follow the lead of the foremost of them and to realize that a club in which members merely sit about and look out of the window is a pretty dull place to the type of younger members they most want to attract, and that the combination of the comfort and smartness of a perfectly run private house with every equipment for athletics, is becoming the ideal in club-life and club-building to-day.

=GOOD MANNERS IN CLUBS=

Good manners in clubs are the same as good manners elsewhere—­only a little more so.  A club is for the pleasure and convenience of many; it is never intended as a stage-setting for a “star” or “clown” or “monologist.”  There is no place where a person has greater need of restraint and consideration for the reserves of others than in a club.  In every club there is a reading-room or library where conversation is not allowed; there are books and easy chairs and good light for reading both by day and night; and it is one of the unbreakable rules not to speak to anybody who is reading—­or writing.

When two people are sitting by themselves and talking, another should on no account join them unless he is an intimate friend of both.  To be a mere acquaintance, or, still less, to have been introduced to one of them, gives no privilege whatever.

The fact of being a club member does not (except in a certain few especially informal clubs) grant any one the right to speak to strangers.  If a new member happens to find no one in the club whom he knows, he goes about his own affairs.  He either sits down and reads or writes, or “looks out of the window,” or plays solitaire, or occupies himself as he would if he were alone in a hotel.