ideas here, there, anywhere. Meets in your office?"

"Yes--a shabby, vulgar place to the outer eye, but so many noble souls
have there struggled out of darkness into light, such mighty Truths
have been born there which will guide the age, that to me it is the
very Holy Ground of Ideas."

"So?" McCall looked at the little man out of the corner of his eye,
and nodded gravely.

"It is a Woman's Club, though men take part in it. But we have such
faith in the superior integrity and purity of woman's mind when
brought to bear on great but hackneyed questions that we willingly
stand back until she has given her verdict. The magnet, sir, pointing
out with inexplicable intelligence the true path to humanity."

"Well, I don't know about that. Though it's very likely, very likely,"
hurriedly. McCall had no relish for argument about it. He was more
secure of his intellect in the matter of peaches than inner lights.
Cowed and awed as he could have been by no body of men, he followed
Bluhm up a dirty flight of stairs into the assemblage of Superior
Women. The office was by nature a chamber with gaudy wall-paper of
bouquets and wreaths. Viewed as an office, it was well enough, but in
the aesthetic, light of a Holy Ground of Ideas it needed sweeping.
The paper, too, hung in flaps from the damp walls: dusty files of
newspapers, an empty bird-cage, old boots, a case of medical books, a
pair of dilapidated trousers filled up one side of the room. A pot of
clove-pinks in the window struggled to drown with spicy fragrance the
odor of stale tobacco smoke. There was a hempen carpet, inch deep with
mud and dust, on the floor. Seated round an empty fireplace, on cane