“Rebecca Einstein,” said the Secretary darkly, “if you’re goin’ to fire off your face about plays an’ the Educational Alliances you can keep your own minnits, that’s all!  Do ye think I’m goin’ to write down your foolishness?  Well, I ain’t.”

Again the President plied her gavel.  “Goils,” she remonstrated, “this ain’t no way to act.  Say, Miss Masters,” she went on, “I guess the whole lot of us is out of order now.  What would you do about it if you was me?”

“I should suggest,” Miss Masters answered, “that the motion to adjourn be carried and that the whole club go into committee on the question raised by Miss Meyer.”

“I move that we take our woik into committee with us,” cried Miss Kidansky, not to be deflected from her buttonholes.  And from such humble beginnings the production of Hamlet by the Lady Hyacinths sprang.

Hamlet was not their first choice.  It was not even their tenth and to the end it was not the unanimous choice.  During the preliminary stages of the dramatic fever Miss Masters preserved that strict neutrality which marks the successful Settlement worker.  She would help—­oh, surely she would help—­the Hyacinths, but she would not lead them.  She had never questioned their taste in the shape and color of their shirt waists.  Some horrid garments had resulted but to her they represented “self expression,” and as such gave her more pleasure than any servile following of her advice could have done.  She soon discovered that the latitude in the shirt waist field is far exceeded by that in the dramatic and she discovered too, that the Lady Hyacinths, though they seldom visited the theatre had strong digestions where plays were concerned.

“East Lynne” was warmly advocated until some one discovered a grandmother who had seen it in her youth.  Then: 

“Ah gee!” remarked the Lady Hyacinths, “we ain’t no grave snatchers.  We ain’t goin’ to dig up no dead ones.  Say Miss Masters, ain’t there no new plays we could give?”

Miss Masters referred them to the public library, but not many plays are obtainable in book form, and the next two meetings were devoted to the plays of Ibsen, Bernard Shaw, Vaughan Moody.  When Miss Masters descried this literature in the hands of the now openly mutinous Secretary she felt the time had come to interfere with the “self activity” of her charges.  She promptly confiscated the second volume of “G.B.S.”  “For,” she explained “we don’t want to do anything unpleasant and the writer of these plays himself describes them as that.”

“Guess we don’t,” the President agreed.  “We got to live up to our name, ain’t we?  An’ what could be pleasanter than a Hyacinth?”

“Nothing, of course,” agreed Miss Masters unsteadily.

“There’s one in this Ibsen book might do,” Jennie suggested.  “It’s called ‘A Dolls’ House,’ that’s a real sweet name.”

“I am afraid it wouldn’t do,” said Miss Masters hastily.