They talked of activity, of accomplishing this and that and the other; they read fitfully at serious books; they planned novels and plays; they separated each day with a comfortable feeling that they had been usefully employed.
And each did learn much from the other; but, as each confirmed the other in the habitual mental vices of the women, and of an increasing number of the men, of our quite comfortable classes, the net result of their intercourse was pitifully poor, the poorer for their fond delusions that they were improving themselves.

They laughed at the "culture craze" which, raging westward, had seized upon all the women of Saint X with incomes, or with husbands or fathers to support them in idleness--the craze for thinking, reading, and talking cloudily or muddily on cloudy or muddy subjects.

Henrietta and Adelaide jeered; yet they were themselves the victims of another, and, if possible, more poisonous, bacillus of the same sluggard family.
One morning Adelaide, in graceful ease in her favorite nook in the small northwest portico of the club house, was reading a most imposingly bound and illustrated work on Italian architecture written by a smatterer for smatterers.

She did a great deal of reading in this direction because it was also the direction of her talent, and so she could make herself think she was getting ready to join in Dory's work when he returned.

She heard footsteps just round the corner, and looked up.