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“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.

“What’s the matter with it?” demanded Susie Meyer.

“Well, in the first place, there are children in it–“

“Cut it! ‘Nough said,” pronounced the President. “Them plays wid kids in ’em is all out of style. We giv’ ‘East Lynne’ the turn down an’ there was only one kid in that. What else have you got in that Gibson book? Have you got the play with the Gibson goils in it? We could do that all right, all right. Ain’t most of us got Gibson pleats in our shirt waists?”

“I don’t see nothin’ about goils,” the Secretary made answer, “but there’s one here about ghosts. How would that do?”

“Not at all,” said Miss Masters firmly.

“What’s the matter with it?” asked one of the girls abandoning her sewing-machine and coming over to the table. “I seen posters of it last year. They are givin’ it in Broadway. The costoomes would be real easy, just a sheet you know and your hair hanging down.”

“It’s not about that kind of ghost,” Miss Masters explained, “and I don’t think it would do for us as there are very few people in the cast and one of them is a minister.”

“Cut it,” said the President briefly, “we ain’t goin’ to have no hymn singin’ in ours. We couldn’t, you know,” she explained to Miss Masters, “the most of us is Jewesses.”

“Katie McGuire ain’t no Jewess,” asserted the Secretary. “She could be the minister if that’s all you’ve got against this Gibson play. I wish we could give it. It’s about the only up-to-date Broadway success we can find. The librarian says you can’t never buy copies of Julia Marlowe’s an’ Ethel Barrymore’s an’ Maude Adams’ plays. I guess they’re just scared somebody like us will come along an’ do ’em better than they do an’ bust their market. Actresses,” she went on, “is all jest et up with jealousy of one another. Is there anythin’ except the minister the matter with ‘Ghosts?'”

“Everything else is the matter with it,” said Miss Masters. “To begin with, I might as well tell you, it never was a Broadway success. It’s a play that is read oftener than it’s acted and last year, Jennie, when you saw the posters, it only ran for a week.”

“Cut it,” said the President. “We ain’t huntin’ frosts.”

The brows of the Hyacinths grew furrowed and their eyes haggard in the search. Everyone could tell them of plays but no one knew where they could be found in printed form and whenever the librarian found something which might be suitable Miss Masters was sure to know of something to its disadvantage.

And then the real stage, the legitimate Broadway stage intervened. Albert Marsden produced Hamlet and the Lady Hyacinths determined to follow suit.