Grandma Plympton—what there was left of her after seventy-four years of time's attrition—had a way of speaking which made it easy enough to believe that she had, in her day, been a beautiful singer. As her message to the world was usually one of promise and reassurance, she had the gift of dwelling with songlike sweetness on those words in which the music lay. She was altogether lovable and quaint. On fine days she would still go forth alone, bearing her mother-of-pearl card-case, and she would leave her card here or there as naturally as a flower drops a petal; for despite her years she had by no means turned traitor to Society. Nor had Society so much as thought of leaving her out. In her, indeed, the fine flower of aristocracy was still in bloom, and delicately fragrant.
The party, suiting their pace to hers, went more slowly after passing Plymptons', whereupon Grandma, finding herself thus accommodated, gave over what efforts she had been making and went more slowly still; and so, when they came to the Brown place, which faced the middle of the common, they were moving at a most deliberate rate. As they arrived opposite the small gate, they all, as if by simultaneous thought, stopped at once.
The object of their sudden interest was a rockery in the front yard. This work, a pile of smooth boulders about three feet in height, and as yet only partially covered with young vines, was the only scenic rival to the artificial pond in the Harmons' front yard. Steve Brown built it to please his mother, picking up a boulder here and there in the course of his travels and getting it home by balancing it on the horn of his saddle. During the last weeks of her illness, when her wandering mind went back to the hills of her girlhood, her imagination played continually around this mimic mountain of Steve's, and as it seemed to be the one joy of her prairie-spent life, he would carry her out on the porch in good weather and prop her up so that she could sit and look at it. Jonas Hicks, becoming interested, took a hand in the work; he kept on making contributions as long as the resources of the country held out. Here was one reason that there was not a sole stone remaining to be discovered.
"If we only had a few of them!" suggested Mrs. Norton.
"Yes—but he might not like it," said the younger Mrs. Plympton.
"But we would just borrow them, you know," explained Mrs. Norton. "And anyway, how are we going to get along without them? Here we have arranged for the Professor to come and tell us about them; and we all promised to bring a specimen. It will seem strange for not one of us to have a rock."
"Oh, I don't think it would do any harm for us to borrow a few stones," said Kitty Wright. "I don't see anything so awful about it."
There came a pause of indecision. Mrs. Harmon—she was the dignified Daniel Webster of the circle, and just the opposite of the small and sprightly Mrs. Wright—was yet to be heard from.
"Really," she said, "we ought not to agree to do things and then not do them. We should have done it or else found somebody like Jonas Hicks to do it for us. What's everybody's business is nobody's business."
"And what's nobody's business is everybody's business," added Mrs. Wright.