There was no doubt what the rest meant to do. With one impulse they turned toward the door as Calliope turned, and silently they took the way that the _pièce de résistance_ had taken before them. Little Mrs. Johnson stood on her chair making many gestures; but no one went back. Calliope looked straight before her. "My feet ache like I done my thinkin' with 'em," she said, "an' my head feels like I'd stood on it. An' what's it all for?" "Regular clock performance," Mis' Postmaster Sykes assented. "We've ticked hard all day long an' ain't got a thing out of it. I often think it's that way with my housework, but I did think the Ladies' Missionary could tick, when it _did_ tick, for eternity. I'm tuckered to the bone." "Nobody knows," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was Mame-Bliss, "how my poor neck aches. It's there I suffer first an' most." Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was walking behind the rest, took three great steps and caught us up and spoke, a little breathlessly:-- "Land, land," she said, "I guess I'll go home an' pop some corn. Seems to me it'd smell sort of cosy an' homelike an' soothin' down. It's a grand thing to smell when you're feelin' far off from yourself." Calliope laughed a little then. "Well," she said, "anyhow I ain't got my silk waist to get into--and I didn't hev a nice one to put on anyway. I was wishin' I had, and now my wish has come true by bein' took away from me, bodily--like they will. But just the same--" She turned on the walk and faced us, and hugged her thin little arms. "A while ago," she said, "I give that little woman there six months to get herself the cold shoulder all around. Well, the time ain't up yet--but both my shoulders feels stone cold!" IX THE COLD SHOULDER There is something more about Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson. Did you ever look through an old school-book of your own and, say, on the history picture of Vesuvius in eruption impose your own memory of Pompeii, visited in these twenty years since you studied about it; and have you not stared hard at the time between and felt yourself some one other than that one who once dreamed over the Vesuvius picture? Or, years after you read the Letters, you have made a little mark below Cicero's cry from exile, "Oh, that I had been less eager for life!" and you look at the cry and at the mark, and you and one of these become an anachronism--but you are not sure which it is that so becomes. So now, in reading over these notes some while after I have set them down, I am minded here to give you my look ahead to the end of the summer and to slip in some account of what happened as a closing of the tale. And I confess that something about me--perhaps it is the Custodian herself--likes this way of pretending a freedom from time and of looking upon its fruit to say which seeds have grown and which have not.