"Honest," she said, "I guess what's the matter with all of us ain't so much what she does as the particular way she does it. It's so with some folks. They just seem to sort of _set_ you all over, when you come near 'em--same as the cold does to gravy. We'd all ought to wrostle with the feelin', I expect." "I expect we had," said Mis' Holcomb, "but you could wrostle all your days with vinegar an' it'd pucker your mouth same way." "Funny part," Calliope observed, "everybody feels just alike about her. When she skips around so sort o' momentous, we all want to dodge. I felt sorry for her, first, because I thought she was in for nervous prostration. But after a while I see it wasn't disease--it was just her feelin' so up an' down significant, you might say." "I donno," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "but it's part the way she says her _a_'s. That real _a_-soundin' _a_ kind," she explained vaguely. "She's so right an' left cuffy--I guess that's the whole thing," Calliope put it in her rich idiom. "Well," said Mis' Amanda, sadly, "there must be somethin' we could like her for, even if it was only her husband." "He ain't what I'd call much, either," Calliope dismissed Mr. Oliver Wheeler Johnson positively; "he's got too soft-speakin' a voice. I like a man's voice to rumble up soft from his chest an' not slip down thin from his brain." I remember that I listened in a great wonder to these women whom I had seen at many an office of friendliness to strangers and aliens. Yet as I looked across the floor at that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson--who, in the hat with the blue plume, was everywhere, directing, altering, objecting, arranging, commanding and, especially, doing over--I most unwillingly felt much as they felt. If only Mrs. Johnson had not continually lifted her little pointed chin. If only she had not perpetually and ingratiatingly smiled when there was nothing at which to smile at all. Then Abigail Arnold hurried up to us with a tray of cups for the Java tea. "Calliope," she said to the chairman of the refreshments, "Mis' Johnson jus' put up her little chin an' says, 'What! ain't we no lemons for the tea?'" Calliope compressed her lips and lifted their thin line tight and high. "Lemins," she replied, "ain't necessarily found in Java. I've a good big mind to go home to bed."