We laughed like children as we loaded my "Java" stuffs on the wagon. Calliope was a valiant helper to Mrs. Johnson, and so I told her. She was standing in the wagon box, one arm about my palm, the other free for driving.
"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.