In Vermilion

In Vermilion, Ohio (pop. 1,464) one evening last week, neither the poetry of Robert Browning nor the novels of Willa Cather were uppermost in the minds of Mrs. Marvell Snyder, wife of the school superintendent, or Mrs. Bessie Roscoe, wife of the Vermilion News editor, as they finished the supper dishes and hurried around to the home of Mrs. Zella English, wife of the Congregational minister. Occasion was a meeting of the Sorosis Club, Vermilion's select female literary-social organization. For the past five months culture had been almost forgotten as the Sorosis Club and all Vermilion rocked with the scandal of a series of anonymous letters.

First letter came to a Sorosis member last July. It said that her husband was "idiotic," that he talked "drivel." that he had "bulgy eyes." It also said that her singing, of which the Sorosis member was very proud, was nothing but "screeching." What else the members read as they passed the letter around, none of them cared to repeat. Some members studied the handwriting, glanced suspiciously at other members. Accusations were made, bitterly denied. Two more letters came to members, both in the same handwriting. Worst of it was that some things in them were Sorosis secrets. Old friends stopped speaking on the street.

At last the clubmates decided that this state of things was unbearable. They got every member to write something on a slip of paper, numbered the slips, sent them, with the letters, to a handwriting expert in Cleveland. He picked out the slip of Mrs. Zenobia Krapp, small, tidy wife of a dairy farmer and onetime president of Sorosis. So did experts in Chicago and New York. Quietly, to spare her feelings, the members called a meeting, suspended Mrs. Krapp from Sorosis.

Though nothing was printed in the Vermilion News, the story, as usual, got around town. By this month it was more than Mrs. Krapp could stand. Flinging gentility to the winds, she filed suit for $10,000 against Mrs. Snyder, Mrs. Roscoe, Mrs. English and the eight other Sorosis members, charging defamation of character. "I've been a good Christian and a good woman all my life," cried Mrs. Zenobia Krapp. "I never wrote those letters."

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