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.
Precisely what emotion this knowledge left with her I have never known.
But I do know that before the meeting broke up, it had been agreed to hold the next one at the house of Miss Caroline herself.

It may be that she suggested and urged this in pure desperation, wishing to regain a favor which she had felt unaccountably withdrawn; and it may be that the ladies accepted in a similar desperation, knowing not how to inform her that she was grossly ineligible for membership in a Home Study Club.
The intervening two weeks were filled with tales and talks of Miss Caroline's heresy.

Excitement and adverse criticism were almost universally aroused.

It was a scandal of proportions almost equal to that of her love for strong drink.