"Well, sir," Mis' Toplady said, "I dunno what you'll think of us, but this is the way it was. I was sitting home by the dining-room table with Timothy night before last. We had a real good wood fire in the stove, and a tin of apples baking in the top, that smelled good. And the lamp had been filled that day, so the light was extra bright. And there was a little green wood in the fire that sort of sung--and Timothy set with his shoes off, as he so often does evenings, reading his newspaper and warming his stocking feet on the nickel of the stove. And all of a sudden I looked around at my dining-room, the way I'd looked at it evenings for thirty years or more, ever since we went to housekeeping, and I says to myself, 'I hate the sight of you, and I wish't I was somewheres else.' Not that I do hate it, you know, of course--but it just come over me, like it has before. And as soon as my tin of apples was done and I took them into the kitchen, I grabbed my shawl down off the hook, and run over to Mis' Holcomb's. And when I shut her gate, I near jumped back, because there, poking round her garden in the snow in the dark, was Mame! "So," Mis' Toplady continued, "we hung over the gate and talked about it. And we came to the solemn conclusion that we'd just up and light out for twenty-four hours. We told our husbands, and they took it philosophic. Men understand a whole lot more than you give them credit for. They know--if they're any _real_ good--that it ain't that you ain't fond of them, or that you ain't thankful you're their wife, but that you've just got to have things that's different and interesting and--and tellable. Anyhow, that's the way Mame and I figgered it out. And we got into our good clothes, and we came up to the city, and went to the hotel, and got us a bowl of hot oyster soup apiece. And then we had the street-car ride out here, and we'll have another going back. And we've seen you. And we'll have a walk past the store windows in the morning before train-time. And I bet when we get home, 'long towards night, our two dining-rooms'll look real good to us again--don't you, Mame?" "Yes, sir!" Mame says, with her little laugh again. "And our husbands, too!" I'd been listening to them--but I'd been watching Ellen. Ellen was one of the women that aren't deceived by outside appearances, same as some. Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb didn't look any more like her city friends than a cat's tail looks like a plume, but just the same Ellen saw what they were and what they were worth. And when they got done: "Do you mean you are going back to-morrow?" she says. "Noon train," says Mame, "and be home in time to cook supper as natural as life and as good as new." Ellen kept looking at them, and I guessed what she was thinking: A hundred miles they'd come for a change, and all they'd got was two street-car rides and a bowl of oyster soup apiece and this call, and they were going home satisfied. All of a sudden Ellen sat up straight in her chair.