City and town life -- Fiction; Romance fiction, American; Short stories, American
"I'm the chairman o' the refreshments, too," she confessed. "Oh, well.
Yourself you can boss round, you know," she threw back, smiling;
"anybody can do that. But your feelin's you're some cramped about
runnin'."
It is certain that Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson was signally unfitted for
a future in Friendship Village. She was a woman of some little world in
which she had moved before she came to us, and in the two worlds she
perceived no difference. Or, where she saw a difference, she sought to
modify it by a touch when a breath would have been too much, and the
only factor of potency would have been a kind of potency of spirit,
which she did not possess.
The Oliver Wheeler Johnsons had moved to Friendship only three months
before, and nobody had looked for them at church on their first Sunday.
"Movin' so, you want your Sabbath to take some rest in, an' you ain't
expected to dress yourself up an' get out to Sunday service an' face
strangers," the village said--and when the two walked into church while
the responses were being made nearly everybody lost the place.
They were very young, and they were extremely well dressed.
"He's got on one o' the long coats," comment ran after church, "an' he's
got a real soft-speakin' voice. But he seems to know how to act."
And, "I declare, nice white gloves an' a nineteen-inch baby-blue ostrich
feather durin' movin' seems some like puttin' on."
And, "The back of her dress fits her just like the front, an' I must say
she knows it. No pullin' down the jacket or hitchin' the strings forward
for _her_, when she stands up!"
As Miggy, who first told me about that day, had said, "That Sunday
morning, Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson was the belle of the congregation."
After service that day, instead of going directly home or waiting to be
addressed, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had spoken to the woman with
whom she had been seated. It was Mis' Postmaster Sykes.
"Thank you so much," Mrs. Johnson said, "for letting us share your pew.
May I present my husband? We have come to Friendship to live, and we
shall be coming here to church. And I shall want to join your Ladies'
Aid Society and your Missionary Circle and, perhaps, be in the
Sunday-school right away. I--I think I'll be less homesick--"
"Actually," Mis' Sykes said afterward, "she took my breath clear away
from me. I never heard of such a thing. Of course, we're real glad to
hev our newcomers Christian people, but we want quiet Christians. An'
did you notice how she was when I give her an introduction around? Why,
she up an' out with somethin' to say to everybody. Just a neat little
'How d' do' wouldn't do for her to remark. I always suspicion them
talkative-at-first kind. It's like they'd been on the stage or brought
up in a hotel."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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